Bloglines now has Atom 1.0 support, and though there are some problems there still, it’s time for a new target. I’m sure it’s clear from all my posts that I’m a big proponent of Atom 1.0. However, I probably appeared to be a bit of a hypocrite, using an aggregator that didn’t support it, and only providing a deprecated Atom 0.3 feed. It’s true, I’m also lazy and picky, and haven’t wanted to make a change in software over these issues. It’s so much more satisfying to simply complain and wait for the software to change so that I don’t have to.
To continue that trend: What’s up with Blogger still producing Atom 0.3 feeds? Initially, it seemed Google gave the Atom movement a big boost by supporting it in Blogger. But now the Atom 1.0 specification has been out for quite some time, and usage of Atom 0.3 is discouraged. Hopefully the reason for not changing yet was fear about support in aggregators, and with Bloglines probably being the biggest (most users) holdout, maybe now is the time to start seeing Blogger produce Atom 1.0. A geek can dream…
So, who are the bloggers with clout or at least information about Blogger? I had been trying to read the blogs of several Blogger engineers, but they mostly moved on, I believe.
The Abdera Apache Incubator project is now up and running. The project is to provide tools for The Atom Syndication Format and The Atom Publishing Protocol. Right now I’m mostly contributing by maintaining the Maven build configuration for the Java implementation. I hope to be able to do a little more later (especially once the World Cup is over…)
I’m convinced that there’s a lot of potential for uses of these two standards (well, soon-to-be-standard in the case of the publishing protocol), beyond blogs & aggregators. Having a good Java library for working with this stuff is going to enable a lot of applications, and save a lot of time and money for tools and products built on Atom. Open source projects succeed based on participation, so if you might need to use Atom, then please, come join in. It’s just getting started, so it’s a good time to get yourself familiar with the code and get your ideas into the mix.
I attempted to make a Maven 2 build for the proposed Abdera project. I’ve never made a patch before, so I attempted it by checking in the contents of the original tar into my local-file-system SVN repository, and then made my changes against that, and finally generated a patch using the Subclipse tools. In case that isn’t good enough, I’m also providing the resulting tar.
The most important thing to note is that when I switched it from Ant to Maven, one unit test now fails that passed before. The resulting XML that is supposed to be checked contains some unexpected spaces. This is probably due to some dependency version difference. The dependencies will need to be looked at and worked on; I just specified enough to get the projects to compile for the most part.
I did update the Ant build file, so that still works. The security and examples modules also build now in Maven (but I did not add them to
the Ant build). There’s plenty of stuff to be improved/changed. The test module should probably go away, and the tests should be moved into
the module that is being tested. The “bin” folders should go away. The .project files should go away in my opinion (they are assumably
broken right now, as I didn’t update them).