Blogging Roller

WCF RSS Toolkit tutorial: The WCF RSS Toolkit is a Windows Communication Foundation-based framework for generating RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 content feeds. Using this toolkit, developers can easily expose a service as an RSS or Atom feed. The toolkit supports exposing a service as an RSS 2.0 feed, Atom 1.0 feed and SOAP endpoint simultaneously. The toolkit can also be extended to support other wire formats.

The announcement is here. We held up the book (yes, this is shameless plug day on Blogging Roller) to cover the Windows RSS platform and now this, the server side of equation. Don't tell Manning about it or my summer will be ruined.

According to Dare, the toolkit could be used to build WebDAV or an Atom protocol implementation, so it's all about REST. But wait, it supports SOAP too.

Like the IBM press release in my previous post, I can't figure this one out. The download includes a small amount of C# code but no docs, not even a README, and no indication of the license. Is it just a one-off proof-of-concept, an official WCF API or what? And what does this effort have to do with the server-side feed syndication platform that Niall is supposed to be building for Microsoft.

IBM press release: Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, declared that the technologies underpinning blogs, wikis and innovative sites like Google Maps and Wikipedia on the Web will transform the way productivity applications are developed...

...IBM's Enterprise Mashup blends external information and web services (e.g., news feeds, weather reports, maps, traffic conditions and more) with enterprise content and services, instantly "mashing" them together to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific business needs. Mashup, derived from the hip-hop practice of mixing song samples, are a website or applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated user application using open technologies like Ajax, PHP and syndicated feeds (RSS or ATOM).

Nice to see IBM paying homage to blogs, wikis and feeds: the web 2.0 building blocks, but the press release is a bit nebulous. It's hard to tell if Smith is discussing an actual product, a "mashup server" as James Govenor put it, consulting services or just making reference to various IBM Web 2.0™ initiatives. If it is a server, I wonder if it's the effort that spawned the Abdera project.