magpiebrain

“Rome”:http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javawsxml/Rome is another Java API which provides RSS parsing capabilities. Unlike the more mature “Informa”:http://informa.sourceforge.net it also supports Atom. Their comparison with Informa makes interesting reading – they state that Informa is hard to use! The mind boggles – here is how you can parse a feed:

FeedManager feedManager = new FeedManager();
FeedIF feed = feedManager.addFeed(getUri());

What is complicated about that? It’s true that Informa doesn’t support Atom yet, but that is a trivial task and support should be in soon (Niko is working on it now). Their only other complaint seems to be that Informa can only 1.0 and 0.91 in output – this is a valid criticism but RSS output never core to Informa’s goals. In any case adding support for other export mechanisms is trivial but to my knowledge has never been requested by anyone.

Whilst it is annoying that people who obviously had gripes with the API chose to write their own rather than offer to change Informa (nothing they seem to want would be a problem to implement), I am a great believer in competition in OS resulting (eventually) in a best-of-breed project, so it will be interesting to see how the Rome project gets on (insert quip about Rome not being built in a day here). For those interested in learning more about Informa, you can find my article “Using RSS in JSP pages”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/08/08/rss.html and “More RSS for Java”:http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/10/30/rss.html at Java.net.