Blogging Roller

Sam Ruby, James Snell and Robert Yates have proposed a new Apache project to provide a reference implementation for Atom: the Atom Reference Implementation or ARI. The plan is to implement an Atom parser, client and server libraries.

Code is already available from James Snell's site (ari.tar.gz, under IBM copyright) and, currently, there are two simple examples: one for parsing a feed and one for posting an entry. I've already taken a quick look and the code looks very good. But it does require Java 5 generics, so we couldn't use it in Roller right now now even if we wanted to.

ARI will definitely overlap with ROME to some extent, because ROME provides an Atom format parser and has plans to include an Atom protocol client and server toolkit. But ROME has always focused on supporting all feed formats (e.g. RSS 0.9X, 1.0, 2.0, Atom 1.0 and even the old and deprecated Atom 0.3) and that's not the intent of the ARI.