Web service and RSS feed (maybe?)

[richiebabes]

I think this is an advanced topic, although I am not an advanced Java user myself. What I want to do is create an app that subscribes to social networking sites, e.g. Twitter, and downloads new content. I think I'll need a web service to do this and I am wondering whether anyone has done anything like this before and whether anyone can give me a kick start and send me in the right direction. Sorry if that's not much info, I am in investigative mode to see whether this can be done.

Thanks!

[OrangeDog]

You just need to connect to the feed and decode the xml data. URLConnection and a simple XML parser is all you need.

[einarb]

You could take a look at rome for parsing or creating rss or atom feeds.

[richiebabes]

Rome is the capital of Italy.

Afraid I don't follow!

Let's say all I want is the XML for someone's latest blog post. I don't need to parse it, just grab it as a file and store it.

[richiebabes]

Also I heard that URLConnection has problem with hanging if there's nothing coming down the pipes.

[OrangeDog]

Well if you're trying to download something that isn't there there's not much you can do anyway.

[einarb]

Rome is the capital of Italy.

Well... a nice article about ROME for you...
Manage RSS feeds with the Rome API - JavaWorld

or if I felt like being plain mean, i could provide you with this link:p

Of course if you don't need all the functionallity of managing different types of seeds (different rss versions, atom versions and so on), it's easier to just write your own xml parser and use URLConnection.