One of the features being introduced to Fantasy-F1.Net in the next few weeks is an RSS Feeds page. During the closed season it is useful to have alternative sources of material to keep people coming back to the site which would otherwise be all but dormant.The RSS Feeds page will provide access to material without the user leaving the site, and with new material being indexed by the search engines, a wider range of search terms have the potential to drive traffic to the site.
The first part of this exercise was originally to identify a suitable tag library to support this functionality. The site already uses the Project Rome library to generate RSS feeds from the site but a search quickly showed that there were no libraries available that either already performed the tasks required, or that could be extended to do so.
The rssutils project from Rodrigo Oliveira provided a useful introduction to doing some of what was required, but the code was old and unfortunately flawed, so the decision was taken to develop a tag library, in a similar vein to the rssutils project, but on top of Project Rome. Having written an initial set of tags the idea to share them for the benefit of others quickly followed and the rss4jsp project was born.
Having perfected the basics of a library I have written a tutorial here and set up the rss4jsp project on SourceForge.net. The distributions (there are two, the library itself and a samples distribution) are now available for download, and the source code (also included in the library donwload) will be uploaded in the next couple of evenings. As I think of ways to extend the library I will add feature requests to the project. Please read the tutorial, try the library, and give me feedback, it will all be appreciated.
rss4jsp is open source software licenced under the Apache Licence, Version 2.0
Nov
24
2 comments
Sebastian says:
December 11, 2008 at 16:53 (UTC 0 )
Hi Phil,
I just wanted to let you know, that I used your library and found it really useful. I also wrote a little blog entry about it at my personal blog.
I found out that you planned adding proxy support.
My application server sits behind a proxy. You just have to set the Java system properties -Dhttp.proxyHost= -Dhttp.proxyPort= etc.
However, explicit proxy support would still be nice.
Thanks again for the library.
best regards,
Sebastian
Phil says:
June 22, 2009 at 07:34 (UTC 0 )
Sebastian, thanks for the feedback. I’m hoping to finally get the 0.2 release out the door in the next month. Not sure proxy support will make it in, given that there are work-arounds. I would encourage users to submit feature requests via sourceforge. I’ve not developed the component as quickly or as much as anticipated, mainly because I’ve been working exclusively with JSF since the start of this year.