You could look at this as an application service that would enable
blogging and podcasting applications.
Alternately, you could look at it more abstractly as a generic
subscription and notification system...a lightweight JMS type thing.
For example, RSS/Atom could be used to enable someone to subscribe to
a category of a product catalog, where notifications would get sent
out if there were any additions to, removals from, or updates of
products in that category. This service could also be used in
workflow design patterns for routing events. The notifications don't
have to be human readable. The feeds could contain any sort of XML
meta data that gets consumed by another service or application. Feed
subscriptions will eventually be customizable using rules and
preferences for filtering, combining, and republishing
feeds...enabling new kinds of aggregation solutions.
You asked how Geronimo could possibly take advantage of this as a
system service. I suppose that developers or system administrators
might want to subscribe to certain system events that typically get
logged and have them presented and delivered in a nicely formatted
RSS/Atom feed. I don't really see it appropriate for any inter-
service communication within a Geronimo node at this point. However,
RSS/Atom could be used to implement an aggregation service framework
that runs across many Geronimo nodes or perhaps to support the
management of those nodes.
That said, I suspect that RSS/Atom will always be focused on content
applications. I see podcasting evolving into a multimedia
distribution system leveraging other technologies like BitTorrent and
DRM with a real potential to become the TiVo for the internet. This
system will require complex solutions such as for matching the right
content types and formats with compatible devices. I spent a couple
of years working on a JSR 124 implementation and see a lot of
parallels with how ring tones and MIDlets currently get provisioned
on mobile phones and how the RSS/Atom space is evolving.
Scott
On Jun 6, 2005, at 9:26 PM, Dain Sundstrom wrote:
On Jun 5, 2005, at 5:25 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
I would be interested in a standard "RSS Syndication/Aggregation
Service" getting included with a future Geronimo distribution. In
my mind this service would make it easy for developers and content
providers to...
1) serve up dynamically generated RSS feeds
2) subscribe to remote feeds with support for filtering and/or
combining feeds and then republishing them (XSLT?)
3) manage subscriptions
4) provide statistics on feed usage
I suspect that the Geronimo dev team's response to this request
will be something like..."great, why don't you get started on
that". Hopefully, others have been thinking along these same lines
though. I will be attempting find some time to work on a ROME
GBean (https://rome.dev.java.net/) in the short to medium term.
I'll be happy to share that code with any interested parties once
I have something. No guarantees on when that'll be.
If anyone has suggestions on how to structure this service, how to
integrate with it, or what features you think are important, I'd
be happy to hear from you here.
Interesting idea. I'm not too familiar with rss other then rss
feeds from blogs and new sites. What sort of information do you
see Geronimo serving via RSS? I mean I'm sure we could serve
general information like blogs, but I'm curious if we could use
this for management of some kind or something totally different.
Again cool idea,
-dain
