* Changes to the build system * Changes to the unit testing code * Changes to the core design
First, I would like to make the following changes to the current build system:
* Change build.xml to use a build.properties file for the following two properties (I've already made these changes locally)
* feedparser.home - The location of the feed parser installation; defaults to ".". Needed so that we can update our unit tests to run cross-platform (they currently only run on Kevins Linux box :)
* ext.lib.path - The location of external JARs needed by the feed parser but which are not included, such as junit.jar. The location to these used to be hard coded in the build.xml file, which is nasty and doesn't work cross-platform.
* Add help to the build.xml file - I've already made these changes locally - essentially this is an ant task, 'help', that provides information on the available tasks and how to configure your system to get the feed parser to work.
* Add ant-contrib.jar to the lib directory and wire it in. Ant-contrib is a nice collection of advanced ant tags, such as an if tag, that can help to make more maintainable ant files. It is opensource.
* Clean up the unit testing targets. Right now we have several testing targets that aren't rationalized. Locally I've created a single task, "test", that by default runs every available task. This task allows an optional argument, "test.only.local", that will only test the local tasks and not the remote ones so that they run faster (Kevin asked for this).
The second set of changes has to do with the unit testing code:
* Several of the tasks are hardwired to paths that only work on Kevins system. I would like to have them load a Java system property, "feedparser.home", that is set by the Ant tasks above before running so that these tests will work on Windows.
* Kevin added some code for two kinds of weblog services that have RSS "pecularities": Yahoo Groups and Flickr. I would like to add tests for these two types
The third set of changes are the largest. Currently we have an object named BlogService that encapsulates the kind of BlogService we are dealing with, such as Flickr, Blogger, etc. This was needed because many services have pecularities that differ from the RSS spec, unfortunately; we still need to work with them though.
Right now we have two classes, BlogServiceDiscovery and ProbeLocator. These two classes use the BlogService that is discovered to attempt to find a feed through aggresive probing if aggresive probing is enabled. Lots of code that is blog-service specific is exposed in these classes, which breaks down for two newer "problem" services, Flickr and Yahoo Groups.
I would like to invert the control as follows. Every BlogService object will encapsulate how to find its particular feed and how to discover if a given URL is of that BlogService type. The BlogServiceDiscovery and ProbeLocator classes will then use the visitor pattern, "asking" the BlogService object to see if it is that type and to locate its feed. This will significantly clean up the BlogServiceDiscovery and ProbeLocator code, and will also make it possible to support services that need more advanced workarounds, such as Flickr. We will subclass the BlogService class for each type of BlogService, and they will be contained inside of org.jakarta.feedparser.locate.blogservice. So we would have org.jakarta.feedparser.locate.blogservice.Flickr, org.jakarta.feedparser.locate.blogservice.Blogger, etc.
Brad Neuberg, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Software Engineer, Rojo Networks Weblog: http://www.codinginparadise.org
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