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20040610 e enjte qershor 10, 2004

Non uno die Roma aedificata est

Which in Latin means "Rome was not built in one day".

Thanks to Tim Bray for publicizing Rome, it is indeed the "java equivalent of Mark Pilgrim’s pythonoid Universal Feed Parser. We learnt a lot about RSS in the wild from Mark's numerous articles and weblog posts (I'm subscribed to his feed since more than 2 years), and about various flavors of RSS from Ben Hammersley's most excellent Content Syndication with RSS.

It's true that Rome is still alpha, because we want the API to get a large review by the community, and we want to write serious unit tests for it. However we tested it with various flavors of feeds already and it is already used by some projects at Sun of which I'll speak later in this blog.

Also Rome is already 3 months old (we started it in march as a skunkwork), even if we waited to have something solid to release it to the community. So yes, it's younger than Mark's 2 years old Python Universal Feed Parser, the 2 years old Java based Informa RSS library, and even the 6 years old Netscape feed system (a mix of Perl and Python) that my team maintained when I was at Netcenter, but expect it to grow in stability, completeness and ease of use.

And Tim, thanks for your kind words and optimism about our abilities:-)

( Qer 10 2004, 02:49:30 PD PDT ) Permalink Comments [4] Chat about it Technorati cosmos Tagsurf It

Comments:

I think it looks very nice, my only gripe is its dependence on JDOM, which seems like a dead project. I have peersonally replaced all my JDOM code with DOM4J which has some active development going on (some equivalent of these libraries should be in the JDK) ideally it would only depend on the JDK since it obviously is a library that one would use as a small component in a larger project.

Posted by Morten Wilken on qershor 10, 2004 at 11:26 PD PDT #

Yes JDOM should go. dom4j is a much better library.

Posted by Unknown on qershor 10, 2004 at 12:30 MD PDT #

Looks very nifty :) However, the litany of gratuitous dependencies makes it a no-go. Xerces? JDOM? Commons? Oh, why, oh, why? Could you not build this so its self-contain and only depends on a standard J2SE? Please? :)

Posted by Zoe on qershor 10, 2004 at 03:27 MD PDT #

I've been able to get it working without using xerces 2.4.0. But I would prefer it if the number of external dependencies were limited as that would reduce the chances of conflict with other libraries that I depend on.

Posted by ade on qershor 10, 2004 at 04:02 MD PDT #

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