RSS and Atom In Action, Manning
Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio
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C# Online.NET Book Review
Although it has no standard definition and refers to a grab bag of techniques, Web 2.0 is a very hot topic. Both Atom and RSS—XML protocols for content syndication—can play a part in Web 2.0 applications. You can view so-called Web 2.0 Web services in action at Goodle Data and Del.icio.us—among other sites.
The previous books I have read on RSS and Atom amounted to little more than histories of the two protocols plus definitions of the standards—all of which is readily available on the Web. Unimpressive. This new book goes way beyond those earlier books both in exploring the possibilities of news and content feeds and in showing how to get started writing code for your application.
The first half of the book does cover the Atom and RSS standards and APIs in a well-organized and detailed fashion; but, more importantly, the second half of the book provides numerous sample applications which can be used as the starting points for implementing your own news and content feed applications. The applications given in the book are simple, but useful. They are like proofs-of-concept—software nuclei around which your own applications can grow.
The book teaches how to:
- automate Web publishing with Atom or MetaWeblog API
- parse news or content feeds with Atom or RSS
- serve news or content feeds with Atom or RSS
- monitor and search the Web for content using Technorati
- use the simple, low-level REST approach to Web services
- use the ROME newsfeed generator and parser
- use the Windows RSS platform (Windows Feeds API) from Internet Explorer 7
- validate news or contents feeds
- write blog applications such as community aggregators; chatroom-, e-mail-, and software-build-to-blog gateways; and podcast servers
The book is totally up to date. In fact, it was, actually, delayed so that the excellent Java ROME parser and Windows Feeds API could be included. Anyone contemplating writing blogging type or news or content feed software will be both inspired and enabled by this book.
All source code examples are in either the C# or Java languages (roughly 50% each).
Bottom line
RSS and Atom In Action is an eye-opening introduction and tutorial to writing applications using Atom or RSS feeds.
Other books in this series
Publisher's description
RSS and Atom in Action is organized into two parts. The first part introduces the blog technologies of newsfeed formats and publishing protocols—the building blocks. The second part shows how to put to those blocks together to assemble interesting and useful blog applications.
In keeping with the principle behind Manning’s "In Action" series, this book shows the reader, through numerous examples in Java and C#, how to parse Atom and RSS format newsfeeds, how to generate valid newsfeeds and serve them efficiently, and howto automate blogging via web services based on the new Atom protocol and the older MetaWeblog API. The book also shows how to develop a complete blog client library that readers can use in their own applications. The second half of the book is devoted to a dozen blog apps—small but immediately useful example applications such as a community aggregator, a file distribution newsfeed, a blog cross-poster, an email-to-blog gateway, Ant tasks for blogging software builds, and more.
About the author(s)
Dave Johnson is an experienced software developer, technology enthusiast, and expert in blog technologies. He started blogging in 2002 using Java-based blogging software that he developed called Roller. Roller now drives the ground-breaking employee blogs at Sun Microsystems, is used by thousands of bloggers on JRoller.com and other sites, and is a successful open source project. Dave now works at Sun where developing Roller and promoting blog technologies is his full-time job. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Table of Contents (abbreviated)
Part 1 Programming the writable web
0 What you need to know first
1 New ways of collaborating
2 Development kick-start
3 Under the hood
3.1 Anatomy of a blog server
4 Newsfeed formats
5 How to parse newsfeeds
6 The Windows RSS Platform
7 The ROME newsfeed utilities
8 How to serve newsfeeds
9 Publishing with XML-RPC based APIs
10 Publishing with Atom
11 Creating a group blog via aggregation
12 Searching and monitoring the Web
13 Keeping your blog in sync
14 Blog by sending email
15 Sending a daily blog digest by email
16 Blog your software build process
17 Blog from a chat room
18 Distribute files podcast style
19 Automatically download podcasts
20 Automatically validate newsfeeds
21 The best of the rest
Preface
Whether you consider the first blogs to be the online journals started around the time Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” in 1997, or the "what’s new" pages at NCSA and Netscape shortly after the birth of the Web, or the political pamphlets of American Revolutionary War times, you have to acknowledge that the concept of blogging is not entirely new. Blogging is just another word for writing online.
What is new is the widespread adoption of blog technology—newsfeeds and publishing protocols—on the Web. In the late 1990s, blog software and Web portal developers needed standard data formats to make it easy to syndicate content on the Web. Thus, RSS, Atom, and other XML newsfeed formats were born. They needed standard protocols for publishing to and programming the Web. Thus, XML-RPC, SOAP, and web services were born.
Now, thanks to the explosion of interest in blogging, podcasting, and wikis, those same developer-friendly blog technologies are everywhere. Newsfeeds are a standard feature of not just blogs, but also of Web sites, search engines, and wikis everywhere. Computers, music players, and mobile devices are tied in, too, as newsfeed technologies become a standard part of browsers, office applications, and operating systems. Even if you don’t see opportunities for innovation here, your users are going to ask for these technologies, and now’s the time to prepare.
This book is about building applications with those blog technologies. For the sake of the cynical developers in the audience, we start with a few use stories that show some truly new ways of collaborating using blog technology. Then, we explain what you need to know about blog technology—and not just RSS and Atom. We also cover blog server architecture, blogging APIs, and web services protocols.
To help you get started, we’ve included what amounts to a blog technology developer’s kit, including a complete blog server, newsfeed parsers, a blog client library and, in part 2, ten immediately useful blog applications, or blog apps, written in Java and C#. The blog server and the ten applications, known as the Blogapps server and Blogapps examples, are both maintained as an open source project at http://blogapps.dev.java.net, where you’re welcome to help maintain and improve them.
I hope we’ve provided everything you need to start building great blog applications, and I look forward to seeing what you build. Enjoy!
