From the ‘veni, vidi, vici SPQR‘ files:
ROME was not built in a day.
I’m talking about the Sun sponsored Java open source ROME project here. ROME is an effort I’ve been tracking for years and is supposed to provide a unified set of tools for parsing, generating and publishing RSS and Atom feeds.
Yes it’s a good idea — that’s why Sun has been working on it for so long. There used to be a lot of confusion across the various RSS (1.0, 2.0) and Atom formats but in recent years I just don’t see that same confusion, at least from an end user point of view. Most modern feed readers just work and leave the mystery of feed format parsing in the background.
ROME which has now finally hit 1.0, has had many iterative versions over the last four years and is a key tool that will enable Java developers to navigate the feed format mystery with relative ease.