RSS and Atom in Action: Web 2.0 Building Blocks

An innovator’s guide to application development with blog, wiki, and newsfeed technologies, this book introduces the new ways of collaboration enabled by these technologies and focuses on the fundamental concepts needed to understand how the technologies can be used in real world applications. Blog and wiki server internals are covered in depth, and newsfeed formats and web service protocols for blogging are covered from a developer’s point-of-view. Also covered are a variety of techiques programmers can use to monitor blog conversations, such as newsfeed search engines, and ways to join in the conversation such as comments, trackbacks, and Weblogs.com pings. Examples in Java and C# are provided to show how to parse Atom and RSS format newsfeeds, how to generate valid newsfeeds, how to serve them efficiently, and how to automate blogging via web services based on the new Atom protocol and the older MetaWeblog API. Focus is given to more than a dozen blog apps—small but immediately useful example applications based on blog, wiki, and newsfeed technologies.