gzleather.netRSS Overview
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a specification for XML files to provide syndicated data. It is typically used by news sites and blogs to provide information concerning the latest news stories, posts, etc., in such a way that links to the stories can be included on other web sites or even downloaded by news aggregator programs. Many thousands of RSS feeds are currently available – take a look at a site such as syndic8 to get an idea.Informa is a relatively new open source Java API for parsing RSS files available from http://informa.sourceforge.net/. The Informa project was the result of merging two Java-based aggregator services: HotSheet and Risotto. This article aims to show how you can use the Informa API to quickly access RSS feeds to add some dynamic news and information content to your web sites.
RSS: An Overview
To begin with, we’ll take a quick look at an RSS example. It’s a very simple format (hence the name Really Simple Syndication), but for those who would like a more in-depth introduction to RSS, you could do far worse than checking out O’Reilly’s RSS site, or by reading Mark Pilgrim’s very good overview.