RSS - Usefulness for client apps

David Stone

That depends on what type of RSS feeds you're talking about. Are you talking about blog RSS feeds? Or do you want likem normal utility type RSS feeds?

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Tom Archer

I'm asking about any type of RSS feed that anyone feels is useful from a client-side application point of view. Cheers, Tom Archer Inside C#,
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework It's better to listen to others than to speak, because I already know what I'm going to say anyway. - Jörgen Sigvardsson

Okeno Palmer

Well that all depends on your type of app I would suppose. A very good source for RSS Feeds is http://www.syndic8.com. They have alot of categories of feeds there so it's just left to your imagination as to how to use them. For example in a financial app, you could have an area that sources financial news to keep the end-user updated on what's going on during the day. In an email app you could have news being sourced from BBC and CNN. I think there are lots of stuff we could use them to do, just have to put some thought into it and you'll come up with something. I have a list of some very good feeds I'll post when I get home. ..:: Keno ::..

Tom Archer

Okeno Palmer wrote: I think there are lots of stuff we could use them to do, just have to put some thought into it and you'll come up with something. I have a list of some very good feeds I'll post when I get home Thanks for the input. However, this is not for me in terms of looking for work to do. I've got too much of that already :) I'm just curious as to how useful other developers think RSS is in terms of client-side programming. Cheers, Tom Archer Inside C#,
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework It's better to listen to others than to speak, because I already know what I'm going to say anyway. - Jörgen Sigvardsson

Tom Archer

I just signed up at that site. Thanks for the link. Please do send that list when you get home. It would definitely be much appreciated. Cheers, Tom Archer Inside C#,
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework It's better to listen to others than to speak, because I already know what I'm going to say anyway. - Jörgen Sigvardsson

Andrew McCarter

The company I currently work for utilized (well, I did seeing as how I wrote the application!) the RSS feed from a news aggregator in the pharmaceutical industry to save themselves over $100k in newsfeed services. On top of that, the ability to disseminate the information to relevant people actually enables them to perform better based off receipt of this information and cross-tabbing it with other sources (according to user feedback anyway). The application does all this for them now - based on user-defined configs. Before, the users would access the service and troll through it trying to make logical deductions. It's so much more robust than screen scraping ... IMHO!

Paul Watson

I do think the RSS spec is useful from a programatic standpoint, couple ideas for apps:

Keep users of your app up to date on news about your app from within your app. i.e. Instead of sending out an email (which is often deleted without reading, mislabeled as spam) everytime there is a new version, announcement etc. have an RSS feed into your app. The app can even then check the category of the RSS item and based on the user preferences alert the user or just list it subtly. e.g. New item in New Version category then alert user. Just a new item in the News category then just put it in the list. RSS is being touted as a good replacement for email newsletters actually.
Tips & tricks for using the app
If your app relies on externally updated data but does not require the overhead of a webservice, then RSS is useful
Weather. One of our clients was relying on a screen-scraper for their weather feed into their intranet. Kept breaking as the weather page updated. Now they take it off an RSS feed from our server
As a value added service an RSS feed of Microsoft Security patches would be damned nice
If financial app, financial feed of currency rates, hot stocks etc. You know, stock ticker stuff, but fed through RSS
If an events app then have a range of event feeds. e.g. a rock concert feed "Hey! The Pixies are playing soon, where? when?"
New books by Tom Archer ;)

There is a lot more I am sure. Really it is thanks to XML. It does depend on the app but here are some good ones that may apply Joel on software[^] (love him or hate him he sometimes has important stuff to say) Microsoft Watch[^] MozillaZine[^] (useful for web-devs) Nick Bradbury/Bradsoft[^] (guy made Homesite, Topstyle and now Feeddemon) Wired[

Tom Archer

Great personal account feedback!! Andrew McCarter wrote: It's so much more robust than screen scraping ... IMHO! No doubt. Data scraping is a last resort sort of thing for sites that don't publish their data via any type of API. Cheers, Tom Archer Inside C#,
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework It's better to listen to others than to speak, because I already know what I'm going to say anyway. - Jörgen Sigvardsson

Andrew McCarter

Tom Archer wrote: Great personal account feedback!! I left out the pain of having to do this using only VB6, MSXML 2.0, ADO 2.1 and needing to deploy the application to an NT4.0 server where it runs as a nightly service. MSXML 2.0 has to be installed via an .msi package. You cannot utilize an .msi package on NT4.0 unless you have SP6 installed. The pain, the pain ... :doh:

Steve Puri

Paul Watson wrote: If financial app, financial feed of currency rates, hot stocks etc. You know, stock ticker stuff, but fed through RSS I was thinking that too, but isn’t this done better with XML Web Services? I'm getting confused about when to use RSS and when to use XML Web Services :confused:

Ian Darling

Steve Puri wrote: was thinking that too, but isn’t this done better with XML Web Services? I'm getting confused about when to use RSS and when to use XML Web Services I agree. RSS is more useful for lots of data with a low rate of change, whereas a Web Service would be more useful where thing can change frequently. I can see RSS feeds being a good log-reading tool, and Web Services being a status monitoring tool - they complement each other. For example, if you wanted to check the status of some server (like, say, Exchange or SQL Server) and find out if its Up/Down/H4x0red, you could call the web service, and if you wanted to see the last ten log entries, use RSS, with links to more detailed information (which would tell you what the l337 k1dd135 tried to do to your server). Actually, that's a pretty good idea and I will squirrel that away for future use. :-) -- Ian Darling "The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything." - Joel Spolsky

l a u r e n

yah ... and a painful last resort too reuters terminals have certain info pages that are not accessible by any other means but u always wonder when the layout is gonna change and when the users are gonna start whining that their numbers arent appearing anymore :suss:

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Tom Archer

Absolutely. It's basically HLLAPI for the Web, but when you have no other choice... Cheers, Tom Archer Inside C#,
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework It's better to listen to others than to speak, because I already know what I'm going to say anyway. - Jörgen Sigvardsson

Okeno Palmer

As promised Tom, here are a few useful RSS Feeds I use on my personal homepage to keep me updated on what's going on around the net. SlashDot http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss Reuters http://rss.syntechsoftware.com/reuters.xml BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs\_news/front\_page/rss091.xml CNN http://rss.syntechsoftware.com/cnn.xml Extreme PC http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/extreme.xml IBM Alphaworks http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/news/dw\_tech\_nl.rss Visual Studio http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/rss.xml Visual C# http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/rss.xml Visual C++ http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/rss.xml .NET Framework & CLR http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/rss.xml Web Services http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/rss.xml JavaWorld http://www.javaworld.com/index.xml CMP-DotNet http://syndication.sdmediagroup.com/feeds/public/dotnet\_.xml CMP-C++ http://syndication.sdmediagroup.com/feeds/public/c++.xml CMP-Java http://syndication.sdmediagroup.com/feeds/public/java.xml CMP-Swaine's Flames http://syndication.sdmediagroup.com/feeds/public/swaine.xml CMP-Security http://syndication.sdmediagroup.com/feeds/public/security.xml CMP-Linux http://syndication.sdmediagroup.com/feeds/public/linux.xml RentACoder http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/LinkToUs/RssFeed\_newBidRequests.asp As you can see there are alot of usefule feeds out there :) ..:: Keno ::..

Paul Watson

Steve Puri wrote: I'm getting confused about when to use RSS and when to use XML Web Services You are not the only one. There are two "movements" afoot. The REST gang and the WebService gang. REST advocate keeping it simple, that before the MS/IBM/Sun/etc. webservices came along we pretty much had all the technology we needed for 90% of the transactions that were required. When you use, for instance, a MS webservice there is actually a lot going on. If you ever hand-code a webservice provider and consumer you will find yourself coding all sorts of things like proxies and SOAP wrappers etc. etc. When you use VS.NET to just whip up a webservice you don't often notice this. All of this is major overhead. 10,000 hits a minute later and you will be wondering if a static feed is not better than a kiff but complicated webservice. Lets say you want a feed of currency rates info. You want to pass to the provider a parameter saying which currency you want back. With the WS way you have to create the SOAP envelope, initiate the proxy objects send the request over the wire to the provider which then has to do it's own SOAP wrapping and proxy creating to provide a return. With the REST way you just hit an XML returning file (either a static XML file or maybe an ASPX/ASP/PHP/CHTML/etc. file which returns XML rather than HTML), pure text over HTTP. No SOAP wrapping, no proxy objects. 90% of the time, that is all we need. For the other 10% of the time when you need things like authentication, binary streaming, signatures, complex-data-type parameters etc. then a full blown WS is needed (though even then authentication/encryption, binary and signatures are already handled by existing web technologies like SSL). So we need both and you use the one that fits the bill. Also remember RSS is XML. You can have a full blown webservice returning an RSS feed. Or you can have a static RSS file sitting in a folder which people hit. Hell, you can use SQLXML with a virtual folder that directly hits your database. You need to do a pros/cons analysis everytime you want to provide or consume data. Then pick the right technology. RSS is useful in that it is a pretty well known standard. If someone says they provide their info in RSS then you will know how to consume it easily. If they say "It's XML but I hashed my own financial structure" then you need to learn their structure. Now for sure, RSS is not for most financial data, but it shouldn't be overlooked. regards,