Apologies if you already saw this over on xml4lib...but it's relevant here given the use of Perl. //Ed
=== Nature Publishing Group (NPG) are pleased to announce the lastest release of their open-source RSS aggregator 'Urchin' to SourceForge (<http://urchin.sf.net>). Initially funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/>) as one of the Publisher and Library/Learning Systems (PALS, <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_pals>) Metadata and Interoperability Group projects, Urchin has been substantially improved. Version 0.92, the current stable release, introduces the following changes: * A mod_perl front end for performance and persistence * Using XML::LibXSLT to improve performance * A new option for using HTTP status codes for error reporting * Old items can be now be expunged after an update via an rator-defined query * Access, admin and error logs * Web-triggerable remote refresh * Configurable RDF output by adminstrator-defined inclusion or n of namespaces * The ability to combine several simple RDF query conditions using AND and OR * Numerous bug fixes Urchin is a Web based, customisable, RSS aggregator and filter. Its primary purpose is to allow the generation of new RSS feeds by running queries against the collection of items in the Urchin database. However, other arbitrary output formats can be defined and generated using XSL transformations or HTML::Template templates. In other words, the collection of Urchin Perl modules form a foundation for building an RSS aggregation or portal service. Urchin is a classic LAMP implementation written in Perl using, wherever possible, pre-existing Perl modules. It uses MySQL for its database functionality and can run using either Apache with a mod_perl handler or any CGI-enabled web server using the CGI script that is included with the distribution. While Urchin is developed on a Red Hat Linux system, it has been ported to Mac OS X, and earlier versions have run successfully under Windows 2000, XP and CygWin. This code has been tested on Red Hat Linux 8.0 running Apache version 2.0.40, MySQL version 4.0.13 and Perl version 5.8.0, and on Mac OS X 10.3.5 running Apache version 2.0.49, MySQL version 4.0.16 and Perl version 5.8.1. Urchin's feature set includes: * Reads RSS 0.9*, 1.0 and 2.0 * Stores all incoming data in RSS 0.9x and 1.0 feeds * Queryable on arbitrary data fields * Supports boolean, simple RDF, full RDF querying * Arbitrary output formats Alongside version 0.92, a development code snapshot has been released that includes support for importing Atom feeds, new administrative commands for defining feed aggregates, and the ability to use RSS and Atom auto-discovery links. Urchin is Free Software. Portions of the code are licensed under the GNU General Public License, the rest under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
