Right on to 0xDECAFBAD

Right on to 0xDECAFBAD.

Here's another reason why I love the blogosphere and the time we live in. Leslie Michael Orchard has a speced out an Atompowered, client/server aggregator:

Here's the post…..

So, besides the funk, there's a little project in which I've gotten immersed. Here's a teaser diagram:

It's a feed aggregator, my third attempt at such. At present, things
are roughly close to the diagram above. Everything is clunky and
command-line driven at present but I've got further plans, like a REST
API for feed queries and manipulation of various things such as feed
subscriptions and the read/unread state of items. Pair this with an
XSLT-driven browser UI, and the possibility of other clients (not the
least of include other Atom-consuming aggregators).

The goal is to make a Client/Server Aggregator. Somewhat serendipitously, I just caught Bob DuCharme's xml.com article on Amazon.com's web services, which I really like
and have drawn inspiration from in thinking about this new aggregator.
Eventually, I want to offer the same sort of XML+XSL style of service
that they've put together, along with some futher inspiration from the Atom API.

Anyway, as another teaser, check out this early demo involving the
XML this thing has been producing, coupled with some experimental XSL:

You'll notice that there are three URLs involved here:

The XSLT expects Atom (plus a few extensions of my own), so you can also do things like this:

These are the sorts of tricks I was looking forward to when I started thinking about things like a universal blog transfer format and rose-colored glasses. XSLT used like this could just as easily produce a blog or RSS 2.0 content.

Anyway, hoping to get some code into CVS by this weekend that's not
entirely embarassing. So if you're interested in this stuff, stay
tuned. I'm hoping that this thing can provide a base for others
interested in feed aggregation if you just want to play with UI, use
the scanning and storage as-is and tinker with XSLT; if you want to
play with storage and query, leave the scanning and UI alone; if you
want to tinker with parsing er, talk to Mark Pilgrim.

More soon!

(Oh yeah, and I will be working on coming up with a better name than dbagg3.
Unfortunately, I probably won't be coming up with a more visually
appealing design for the UI, since what you see is the best I can do.
Heh, heh. Don't let your programmers do visual design) [0xDECAFBAD]  [Marc's Voice]

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