RSS

Michael Horne

Contents

1. What is RSS?

2. History

3. RSS and Java

What is RSS?

A method for syndication of news News

Slashdot, Wired and other news based sites

Changelogs Recent Changes Dynamic Bookmarks

Firefox

RSS is a XML application

What is RSS?

RSS Aggregators Bloglines Planet Rhodes

Aggregation of many weblogs at rhodes

History of RSS

Unfortunately RSS has had a messy development history

Lack of standards Implementations can expect to need support

for 7 not so subtly different versions

Definition

Depending on implementation RSS could stand for Really Simple Syndication Rich Site Summary RDF Site Summary

History of RSS

Initially produced by Netscape (ver 0.90) Portals to news sites Overly complicated Planned to simplify

Netscape stopped due to lack of interest

History of RSS

Userland developed (0.91 through 0.9x) Overly simplified

Concurrently a non-commercial group developed 1.0 (based on RDF) Extensive use of namespaces

History of RSS

Userland Released 2.0 Modular Easy Migration from the 0.9x branch

RSS 2.0<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> <channel> <title>XML.com</title> <link>http://www.xml.com/</link> <description>XML.com features a rich mix of information and

services for the XML community.</description> <language>en-us</language> <item> <title>Normalizing XML, Part 2</title>

<link> ttp://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/...</link> <description>In this second and final look...</description> <dc:creator>Will Provost</dc:creator> <dc:date>2002-12-04</dc:date> </item>...

</channel></rss>

RSS and JAVA

Commonly done with beans Easily implemented as it is XML based

Commercial versions available although expensive

Questions?