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.

Rome v0.2 is out

We've just postedRome v0.2

We've been fighting to get everything ready for the release.

Summary of the changes:

• Removed dependencies on other components except JDOM
• Hid implementation packages/classes from public API
• API interfaces/classes renaming
• Some API signature changes

Some of them were done based on some feedback we've received. Others to try bringing consistency to the naming. And others to enable certain usage pattern in applications using Rome.

All the changes (15 of them) are documented in the Changes Log.

I hope feedback keeps coming, that will help us make Rome better and easier to use.

Enough of this, now I have go back to my day job.

To myself, for the Nth time, *never underestimate the effort behind doing a release*

And I'm talking about a small project, Rome v0.2 (It's almost there).

Getting the code changes integrated it's the easy part. Getting all the supporting materials ready is a Pharaonic task. General documentation, changeslog, tutorials, javadocs, updating the samples, testing the samples, preparing the distribution bundles and staging all this in the site. Ensuring (or at least trying to) everything has been updated.

We don't want to get into the we can do that later approach as most of the times later becomes asymptotic to never.

With Rome we are still organizing the site. Deciding where things should go etc. We are using Rome Wiki as the main (and only for now) documentation source, we have to decide what documents we want to keep alive (changing as we go) and what documents we want to freeze with every release. Maybe things will get easier after we have all this settled. I'm making a mental note (too bad I keep losing them) to comment again on this for Rome v0.3, to see if things got better.