Tuesday June 08, 2004

Trying to end Syndication feeds Hell, at least for Java developers

After a month of work or so we did it. 'We' are Patrick, Elaine and myself. 'What we did' is Rome.

You may not care who we are, but [if you are a Java developer and you are doing anything that involves RSS or Atom syndication feeds] you'll likely care about Rome.

Rome is a set of Atom/RSS Java utilities that makes it easy to work in Java with most syndication formats. It supports all flavors of RSS (0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0 and 2.0) and Atom 0.3 feeds. It includes a set of beans, parsers and generators for the various flavors of syndication feeds, as well as converters to convert from one feed type to another. It also includes a generic normalized SyndFeed class that lets you work with any feed type without bothering about the incoming or outgoing feed type.

Rome is one of those projects I'd had preferred not to have spent time working on. It came to be out of frustration, or better said to stop frustration.

What kind of frustration I'm talking about?

First, the nonsense of syndication feeds. Second, the absence of a library that does a good job abstracting all that nonsense from the developer. And third, the quality of available documentation (this last one is in fact a general problem.

So, we decided to do something about and that something is Rome. By addressing the second we took care of the first (insert second part of the title here). And for the third -the documentation- we made an special effort from the very beginning.

Rome is just starting, there plenty of things to improve, to fix and to add.

Check it out and let us know what you think.