Manage RSS Feeds With the Rome API

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an established way of publishing
short snippets of information, such as news headlines, project releases,
or blog entries. Modern browsers such as Firefox, and more recently
Internet Explorer 7, and mail clients such as Thunderbird recognize
and support RSS feeds; not to mention the a large number of dedicated
RSS readers (aggregators) out there. The large number of individual
formats (at least six flavors of RSS plus Atom) can make it difficult
to manipulate the feeds by hand, however. RSS feeds aren't just for
end-users, though. A variety of application scenarios could require
you to read, publish, or process RSS feeds from within your code. Your
application could need to publish information through a set of RSS
feeds, or need to read, and possibly manipulate, RSS data from another
source. For example, some applications use RSS feeds to inform users
of changes to the application database that could affect them. RSS
feeds also can be useful inside of a development project. Tools like
Trac let you use RSS feeds to monitor changes made to a Subversion
repository or to a project Web site, which can be a good way to easily
keep tabs on the status of many projects simultaneously. Some
development projects, for instance, use RSS feeds to monitor continuous
integration build results. End users simply subscribe to the CI server's
feed in their RSS reader or RSS-enabled Web browser. The server
publishes real-time build results in RSS format, which the client can
then consult at any time without having to go to the server's Web site.
In this article the author shows how to manipulate RSS feeds in Java
using the Rome (RSS and Atom utilities) API. He also develops a concrete
application of these techniques, writing a simple class that publishes
build results from a Continuum build server in RSS format. More Information