RSS tools

Without wanting to get into the my-newsfeed-format-is-better-than-yours discussions, I miss not having a feedreader for BeOS. The basic library will support any of the flavours of RSS I bump into as I go along, at the moment it just handles 1.0 and 2.0 directly, which means it tends to handle all of the 0.9x versions too. Atom support may follow in due course, but in the ordinary lazy fashion I shall add support once it is needed, and not before. At present there are few feeds I'd like to read that aren't available as RSS 0.90-1.0-2.0; Atom support may not be worth the candle. Time shall tell.

I also know the feedreader I want (and will write) isn't necessarily what others like. Lots of people like the three-panel readers, but that feels a bit too much like wading through mail. So, I'm packaging up the RSS grunt work in a separate library so others need not fret about all the different flavours of RSS and can get on and write the funky little app they can imagine.

As well as wanting this personally, it also plays into videdot. libbefeed will form the basis of one of the first plug-ins, to best use the network to fetch the media you want to watch. Just subscribe to a feed telling you what to record, or where to find programming you have missed. It has become a popular approach from the TV/BitTorrent folk in recent months (a.k.a. broadcatching, which we'll also do as no-click, obviously).

libbefeed

Provides the basic functions needed for any feed reader for BeOS. Only supports RSS & HTTP and local file URLs at present, but should be extended in future. The HTTP implementation needs beefing up, but it does a reasonable job with the simple stuff, and supports If-Modified-Since (and soon ETags) to avoid clobbering sites, and does the Right Thing with HTTP responses that say they have been Moved Permanently and rewrites the source to go to the new location in future.

To do:

• Add support for HTTP DTDs to the Xerces library port for BeOS. Or failing that, cache the DTDs for supported versions of RSS and workaround the fatalError we get from Xerces at present.
• Alternatively, switch to expat, which is what libbsvg uses, which we're likely to use in the main videdot project anyway.
• Add support for other feed formats as desired.

ShowFeed

Simple app for putting the feed library through its paces.

To do:

Could add menu-options for launching items &c. Snownews covers that ground quite well though.

RSSdesk

Still in closed testing, a binary package will go up when time allows for testing, followed by source code a smidge later.

To do:

• Finish Launch capabilities. [Done]
• Fix up deskbar replicant creation code. [Simple]
• Decide on-disk format for preferences (and what we're storing).
• Add prefs window for subscribing to feeds.

RSSphp

Not especially for BeOS, but can be used there.

A fragment of the Future i toolkit that's escaping before a full release of the kit. Makes it quite simple to write RSS 2.0 feeds for your site using PHP.

To do:

• Add a simple config option to create 1.0 feeds if people prefer from the same source.
• In future, possibly add other feed formats.

Download these RSS tools