Russell Castagnaro

Two years ago I wrote Java classes to parse through news sites like Yahoo and AltaVista to enable live news feeds on my Web site. Unfortunately, this led to an enormous amount of maintenance due to the formatting dependencies associated with each source. One year later, using the power of Resource Site Summary (RSS), XML, and servlets, anyone can get live news and learn about the technologies used. In this article I explain how developers can easily enable news feeds on any servlet-powered site leveraging RSS, XML, XSL, servlets, and WARs. The article covers the Servlets 2.2 API, XML, XSL Transformation, and Resource Definition Format. We've come a long way, baby! XML- and Java-related technologies have made solving business problems much easier in the last several years. I'll share some of the pain I felt when first implementing server-side news feeds in those an... (more)