Generate your RSS feed in Java

Mon, Sep 5, 2005 There are some open source projects that can help you in generating or reading RSS feeds in Java. I found only two libraries a bit mature, other code is often embedded in other open source products (jroller for example):

• Informa: Does various RSS formats and Atom 0.3. Documentation is better than its alternative, but less focused (has some hibernate helper thingy, some lucene helper, etc.).
  
• Sandler: There is no working homepage while I am writing this. But the code is of decent quality, supports Atom 0.3 and RSS 1.0. It is easy to use it. However in reality it is not much more than a wrapper around some XML parser specialized in generating an RSS structure or an Atom structure.
• Ooops, I forgot another important one, Rome. This RSS/Atom framework with a catchy name is very similar to Informa, has good documentation and good looking code. Under the hood it makes use of jdom.

I personally use dom4j since I only need to generate RSS, and RSS, or Atom are just XML. I don't find it particularly verbose to use dom4j for that, and it is very flexible.

If you need to parse feeds, then those libraries might make sense and save you a bit of time. For generating, I think their main interest is to abstract you from the differences in formats. So if you need to handle different formats, a framework will allow you to do it through only one API, which can be a big time-saver.