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e martë qershor 08, 2004

All feeds lead to Rome!

After a few months of incubation internally at Sun, and a frenzied activity in the past few days, Tucu, Elaine and myself are proud to present you Rome, a Java library to handle Syndication feeds.

We support all flavors of RSS (0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0 and 2.0) and Atom 0.3 feeds.

Syndication format's history in the past few years has been rich, and... how would I put this?... colorful.
The result today is a mishmash of specs of various qualities all standardizing pretty much the same things, with subtle differences in syntax and appproach. This is a fascinating study for XML (or RDF) geek, but us javaheads have more important things to do: build apps that take advantage of the increasing number of feeds that are available.

In designing this API we strived for simplicity for the developer: we handle the dirty details of different feed formats, and present you with a java abstraction of all these. You can build your applications using this abstraction. But if you want to get under the hood, convert feeds from one format to another or work only with one type of feed, we let you do that as well. We believe in Larry Wall's Perl motto: "making easy things easy to do, and hard things possible".

We released Rome on java.net, for the infrastructure they provide, under the Apache license, so feel free to use it in your projects.

What triggered the creation of Rome (apart from Romulus killing Remus, or Aenea fleeing Troy in flames) is the realization that there were many projects dealing with RSS at Sun, that the other open source Java libraries we looked at did fulfill our requirements, and that such a general purpose library would be better developped as an open source project than a Sun internal project.

Rome is at version 0.1, it's clearly alpha, and we are eager to get developer's feedback about it (the Rome Wiki is a good place to do that:-)