Blogging Roller

I've been in crunch-mode working on a new project, but I've been trying to keep an eye on what's going on the world of Atom Publishing Protocol or AtomPub as the cool kids call it. Here's a wrap-up of some of the AtomPub news I've picked up on the past month or so.

Specifications

The big news is, of course, that AtomPub has been granted an RFC number RFC-5023 and is now an IETF "proposed standard" like Atom format (RFC-4287). The folks at Ricoh have provided a Japanese translation.

Extensions to AtomPub are under development and you can find a good list of them at the XML Cover Pages page for Atom. One I find interesting is James Snell's AtomPub Feature Discovery spec, which is designed to help AtomPub clients determine what features are supported and required by servers. The features spec is controversial and has sparked a lot of good discussion including, Brian Smith's email Atom Weblog Publishers Guide and Sergey Beryozkin and Dan Diephouse's discussion of AtomPub and WS-Policy

Server implementations

More big news to report here: the new Wordpress 2.3 release provides full support for AtomPub. Sam Ruby blogged about it in Wordpress 2.3 loves AtomPub and the Wordpress 2.3 AtomPub docs provide a good summary and cover some limitations. Yesterday, Sam posted Wordpress vigilance and plans. He wants to get Wordpress to score a perfect 0 errors and 0 warnings on the APE tests, which means among other things preserving foreign markup.

New releases of Apache Roller have also been updated for the final AtomPub spec. The upcoming Roller 3.1.1 and Roller 4.0 releases include AtomPub support. Both releases are up for vote now, so they should be out Real Soon Now. And I'm working on adding AtomPub support for comments for Roller 4.1, building on top of the Atom Threading Extension (RFC-4685).

I've been googling and browsing the SixApart site, but I can't figure out if Movable Type 4.0 supports the final AtomPub spec. Anybody know?

And Google has added another AtomPub based API. Read about it on Bill de hÓra's blog YouTube via GData and on the YouTube Developer API blog: New YouTube API Released into the Wild.

Client implementations

In Stick a fork in it Joe Cheng writes "The Windows Live Writer team is still on track to deliver AtomPub support in the next version, which I am looking forward to immensely. It’s definitely an exciting time to be in the blogging tools space!" Based on what I saw at the last face-to-face AtomPub interop, it looks like Microsoft may have the best AtomPub-based blog client around. I wonder when MarsEdit and Ecto will get on board with AtomPub.

Toolkits and programming libraries

I already blogged about the Propono 0.6, a Java-based client and server library for AtomPub, which has been updated for final spec. Since then the Apace Abdera project has released Apache Abdera (incubating) 0.3 release is available with a long list of improvements and new features. There are also a couple of usage notes from James Snell. Also on the topic of Abdera, Dan Diephouse has done some work to make Spring and Abdera work well together.

The Perl AtomPub::Client at CPAN has updated for final AtomPub too.

That's all I've got for now. Did I miss any important AtomPub news?