Harvesting News with DOMIT! RSS
Released on = September 8, 2004, 11:48 am
Press Release Author = Thomas Mitchell
Press Release Summary = New Open Source tool makes gathering electronically
syndicated information less complicated.
Press Release Body = “You can use a combine to harvest wheat,”
said John Heinstein,
VP of Software Development for Engage Interactive. “But you
wouldn’t use it to
harvest apples or blueberries. In a sense, the same holds true for
harvesting
information. You use a web browser to gather information from a
news web site (e.g.,
Wired News – the online edition of Wired) but you would need
a completely different
tool to harvest information from an RSS feed.”
An RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) feed is
a popular XML-based
format for the online syndication of content such as news articles
and serialized
novels. “The problem is,” said Mr. Heinstein, “there
are several different versions
of RSS and they all work differently. It’s messy and difficult
to work with all
these different formats.”
The DOMIT! RSS parser is an Open Source object-oriented PHP library
designed to
facilitate the task of extracting content from all types of RSS
feeds in a uniform
manner. “It provides a simple programming interface for gathering
common RSS
elements such as the title, URL and description of the content,”
said Mr. Heinstein,
“as well as the more esoteric RSS elements and user-defined
tags”.
“This tool introduces a structure for thinking about RSS
programmatically,” said Mr.
Heinstein, “without having to master all the subtle differences
between RSS
versions.”
DOMIT! RSS also has an integrated caching system that stores local
copies of RSS
feeds. “These are refreshed only at those intervals specified
by the user,” said Mr.
Heinstein, “thereby conserving bandwidth and leading to faster
response times.”
works with non-conformant XML.
DOMIT! RSS is built on DOMIT!, a DOM-based XML parser. This allows
access to the RSS
data using the standardized DOM API, in addition to the specialized
DOMIT! RSS API.
DOMIT! RSS is released under the LGPL license, which means that
it can be
incorporated into commercial software, as long as the DOMIT! RSS
source code is made
available and the license statement is left intact.
DOMIT! RSS is available free of charge at
http://www.engageinteractive.com/mambo/index.php?option
Web Site = http://www..engageinteractive.com/domitrss/
Contact Details = Thomas Mitchell, Director of Business Development
921 College Hill Road
Fredericton, NB
Canada, E3B 6Z9
Phone: 506-460-1628
Fax: 506-460-1626
Email: tmitchell@engageinteractive.com
URL: www.engageinteractive.com
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