Thursday September 08, 2005

ROME 0.7 is available

ROME v0.7 Beta and ROME Fetcher v0.7 Beta are available.

What is new:

• A cool logo
• Bug fixes
• Several Date and time parsing improvements including support for custom parsing masks
• Fix for leaking URL Connections which could cause problems in long running applications using ROME Fetcher

For the full list of changes, fixes and additions refer to the ROME Changes Log and the ROME Fetcher Changes Log

ROME still does not have support for Atom 1.0 nor the Content module. We are planing on adding support for them in a future release.

Thursday August 18, 2005

Waiting for RSS 10000 spec

Today somebody anounced RSS 3.0 Lite. As I've posted it the ROME alias: Didn't go through in detail yet but it looks like somebody either is having fun or needs a bit common sense. Why would you have an attribute isEmpty to indicate the element is empty?

Even the Register took notice of if, check Mark Woodman's R4A2 blog about it.

Please keep them coming.

Friday April 01, 2005

New release of ROME and ROME Fetcher, v0.6 Beta

ROME v0.6 Beta and ROME Fetcher v0.6 Beta are available in the ROME site.

Highlights of this release:

• Date-time parsing fixes
• XML prolog parsing and generation fixes
• Added an XML healer to handle HTML literal entities
• Configured RSS2.0 to handle DC Module
• RSS 1.0 parser and generator fixes
• DC Module elements now support multi-values
• Fetcher now provides support for processing of retrieved feeds inside event handlers

For the full list of changes, fixes and additions refer to the Changes Log.

Tuesday March 29, 2005

ROME wants a logo

First get something real then go for the imaginery.

We are looking for a Logo now (I think P@ has a new iron to ruin). From ROME user alias:

All,

We are pleased to announce a ROME Logo Contest starting today.

   http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javawsxml/RomeLogoContest

We encourage anyone who is interested (even people who don't use ROME)
to submit a logo design that will represent the ROME Project.   Check
out the above link for details.

So fire up GIMP/Inkscape/Photoshop/Illustrator and show us your
design-fu.    Otherwise, please help us get the word out so that we
can get a lot of submissions.

Best Regards,

   Mark

-- 
Mark Woodman
http://inkblots.markwoodman.com

Monday January 10, 2005

ROME v0.5 Beta released

Version 0.5 of ROME and ROME Fetcher are available.

With version 0.5 we've moved from Alpha releases to Beta releases. After 1/2 year, several changes and fixes and a good number of developers using ROME we consider ROME API and code are stable enough to go Beta.

Highlights of v0.5 Beta release:

• Removed common package and classes from the public API
• Removed Enum class, using plain constants now
• XmlReader now has a lenient behavior for charset encoding detection
• Bug fixes
• The Fetcher adds experimental support for RFC3229 Delta encoding

Wednesday June 16, 2004

RSS Specifications and schemas (well, not really)

This morning, in an internal Sun alias, somebody asked

Are there specifications available for the various RSS formats (not including the atom work at the IETF)? ... Dare I even hope for something like a schema?

YEAH RIGHT, I want that too. My reply to that poor soul was something like this

If you dare calling them specifications here they are: RSS 0.90, RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0.

I'm still on the quest for DTDs or XML-schemas for all of them but the folks that wrote these *specs* apparently were too busy for such distractions.

And there is even more, you have even different versions with the same version number, isn't that great? Mark Pilgrim did a very good analysis of the different RSS versions.

I'm sure others will find useful having all these links together.

Monday June 07, 2004

Syndication feeds Hell, Addendum I

When writing Syndication feeds Hell I've forgotten to mention the following.

Leaving evolution aside -which it could have been done in an orderly and backwards compatible manner- I don't see the different RSS flavors and Atom having irreconcilable technical differences. It's all just an EGO thing.

Sunday June 06, 2004

Syndication feeds Hell

Before you continue reading, the topic covered in this posting has been widely discussed already. Following you'll find a rant on the nonsense of Syndication feeds, RSS0.9 ... RS2.0 and Atom. I just needed to write it to take it out of my system. You've been warned.

I've been following some of the technologies used and/or being developed around weblogging for a while now. I find very interesting how features and functionality keeps being added to the weblog world with (almost) no impact on the bloggers, their weblog systems take care of doing most (if not all) the job (ie: web pinging, trackbacks, etc). My interpretation is that [maybe] the reason for this it is that not always these features are brainchildren of technical oriented folks (you know, programmers). Or if they were thought by technical oriented folks, those folks knew the fact not everybody is techie. It's like the approach has been “It would be nice if when I post a weblog the following happens" instead of being “It would be nice if I can do the following when posting a weblog".

Granted that things get a little hairy when you get N ways of doing the same thing in a short period of time where N closely equates to the number of weblog software packages out there. In the end it's Darwinism in action and after a while things settle. Not a bad thing, even if the prevailing technology doesn't do it for its technical merits.

But there is an exception. One of the first and core features weblogs rely on, syndication feeds. Things went wild there and it is not that we are getting insects, reptiles or mammals. They are all almost the same. And *almost* is the problem. I won't go on the history, all the differences among the different types of feeds or their design problems, pretty good articles and weblogs have been written about it. One of my favorites is Mark Pilgrim's The myth of RSS compatibility. And don't forget to add Atom to hte mix.

It's just plainly insane. Their specifications shouldn't be called that. Think, if you are doing an application that will parse an XML document, what is one of the first things you want to do, ensure the XML document is valid. To do that you'd like to have a DTD or the XML-Schema handy. With the exception of Netscape's RSS 0.91, (that has DTD), none of the RSS or Atom specifications includes a DTD or XML-Schema(*). If you are a programmer that has to deal with syndication feeds, you know this is just the beginning of your nightmare.

A few of months ago I started working on some projects around collaboration and I've became a victim myself of what I call Syndication feeds Hell.

Addendum I

(*) If you find them please let me know, I've spent Google hours with no luck.