e martë qershor 08, 2004

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:-)

Non uno die roma aedificata est

Happy feed parsing!

See the Rome Wiki for more details about Rome

I'm not used to so much attention: There's been an OSNews thread about blogs.sun.com: Sun Opens Up with Blogging; Solaris Tidbits.

The night before I had been messing up with my stylesheet in order to prepare for a presentation I have to give soon about advanced Roller use (messing your stylesheet, what an advanced use:-), and left it in a unfinished state: I had set font-size: large for all styles.

I didn't know I would have such an attentive readership: Chris Sears commented about it in the thread 21 inch Sun monitor required to read?. I guess I should use the server on my laptop for that kind of tests!
Thanks for the comment though, Chris.

Now I switched to the Berkeley theme, which I need to customize, but I like the cleanliness of the design.

TheServerSide post AOP: AspectWerkz 0.10 released, articles, & Dependency-Oriented mentions a few very interesting posts and articles about AOP.

Adrian Colyer gives a good example of how AOP can help make programs simpler, and his "buzzword free" definition of AOP goes straight to the point(cut):-).

But the real meat of the post is Jonas Boner going out of the woods and explaining what he's been doing in the past 6 months, ie integrating AspectWerkz in JRockit, the BEA JVM. Taking advantage of their JRockit Management API to do runtime weaving is a great way to push AOP in production. About this you should also read Kevin Bedell's interview of BEA's Bob Griswold, who is Jonas' manager.

InternetNews: eBay announces RSS feeds. Thanks, Micah, for letting me know. Jeffrey McManus' weblog has more (he's the developer evangelist for eBay). What an interesting way to break news!

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

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