Blogging Roller

For RSS and Atom in Action I developed a simple blog client API, which I've written about before. This week I'm wrapping up my chapter on the Atom protocol and doing some testing of both a) the MetaWeblog/Blogger API and b) the Atom Publishing Protocol implementations of my simple API. To guide my testing, I created a matrix on my white board that looks something like the table below.

Feature	a) MetaWeblog Blogger API	b) Atom Publishing Protocol (Draft 6)
Multiple blogs per user	yes	yes
Save, update and delete entries	yes	yes
Entries with multiple categories	yes	yes
List available categories	yes	planned?
Save drafts	yes	yes
List entries (with paging)	yes but no paging*	yes
Upload and update uploaded files	yes	yes
Delete uploaded files	no	yes
List uploaded files (with paging)	no	yes
Get and set templates	yes	planned?
Delete templates	no	planned?
List templates (with paging)	no	planned?

* The Blogger / MetaWeblog API getRecentPosts() methods allow you to list recent blog entries, but there's no way to page through or request a range of entries.

As you can see, Atom protocol is not finished. I hope that when it's finished it'll have the features listed above, but that remains to be seen. In the latest Atom protocol spec (Draft 6), there's no way to get a list of the categories available in a blog and there's no way to get and set templates. Personally, I don't think anybody would miss get/set templates, but List categories is pretty valuable. IMHO, if we could get List categories into Atom protocol (instead of bickering about collection representations and introspection), we'd be done.

Update: I just made a couple of tweaks to the list of features and I may do a couple more.

Tags: topic:[Atom], topic:[Atom Publishing Protocol], topic:[Web Services], topic:[MetaWeblog API]