Overview of Feed samples
Feeds are a mechanism to deliver content in a standardized specification format. Atom Syndication Format and RSS are two such specifications. Feeds support within WebSphere Application Server is supported using either of Apache Wink or Apache Abdera.
Apache Wink, in addition to being an implementation of JAX-RS, has in-built support for producing and consuming of Atom, APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) and RSS documents, and is the recommended library for Feeds support within WebSphere Application Server. Following are the advantages of Apache Wink over Apache Abdera:
- The object models and APIs for reading/writing of Atom, APP and RSS documents in Apache Wink are based on JAX-RS and JAXB, and hence are more standardized than in Apache Abdera.
- Apache Abdera has only read support for RSS while Apache Wink has both read and write support for RSS.
The use of Apache Abdera as a feeds library within WebSphere Application Server is deprecated, and is documented here only for backward compatibility.
Feed Samples, and what they demonstrate
The Feed samples have been built to demonstrate the Atom and RSS
support in Wink and Abdera. In addition, it also demonstrates Atom Publishing
Protocol support. These are the specific scenarios that they support.
- Generate an Atom feed - a simple example to create an Atom
feed
- Read an Atom feed - an example to read Atom content.
For example, read an Atom feed from the O'reilly site:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/1
- Generate an RSS feed - a simple example to create an RSS
feed
- Read an RSS feed - an example to read RSS content. For
example, read an RSS feed from
http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
- Atom Publishing Protocol support - demonstrates the ability to
create, update, delete, and retrieve entries in a feed. Also provides
options to retrieve the service document, and the associated feed.