Blogging Roller

Prompted by the news of the Rome effort, I started taking a serious look at the various Java based Weblog and Wiki libraries last night. Starting with the list compiled by the Rome guys in What's wrong with other existing RSS parsing libraries, I started to build my own list. I expanded my list to include not only newsfeed parsing libraries, but also blog/wiki API server and client libraries. I also added a couple of clarifications and a couple of categories: 1) newsfeed parsing and producing, 2) server-side libraries, 3) client-side libraries.

It is interesting that there are two Atom API server libraries, but no Atom API client library (except for Gilmore which is just getting started). This illustrates the fact that the Atom API is new, still in flux, and interesting only to server developers at this point. Also interesting: all of the newsfeed parsing libraries parse news feeds as XML, there is no Java equavalent to Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser.

One question that crossed my mind: should Rome include a blogging client library? Posting, updating, and deleting posts via the XML-RPC based Blogger API or the REST-based Atom API is not exactly easy to do. Wouldn't it be nice to have a client library with an easy-to-use set of interfaces for this.

Here is my list of Open source Java libraries for Weblogs, Wikis, and Newsfeeds.:

• Informa - library for parsing and producing RSS, RDF, and very soon, Atom. Also includes database persistence layer. Established May 2002, under active development, latest release 0.5.
• Rome - library for parsing and producing all flavors of RSS and Atom. New effort started June 2004, latest release 0.2.
• RSSLibJ - primarily for generating RSS. Development stalled?
• RSS Utilities - JSP tags for parsing and displaying RSS presented in a java.net article.
• RSS4J - parser for RSS and RDF. Development stalled?
• FeedParser - Kevin Burton's parser, drives Newsmonster.

• Sandler - toolkit for implementing Atom API in a web application, includes an Atom parser. Used by Blojsom.
• Atom4J - toolkit for implementing Atom API in a web application, includes an Atom parser. Used by Roller.

• Gilmore - soon to be a full function Atom API client library, under development. Sister project to Sandler.
• Hula - client library for programming Wikis that implement WikiRPCInterface. Associated with JSPWiki
• Apache XML-RPC - good do-it-yourself starting point for implementing a Blogger API or a WikiRPCInterface client.