Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

IM and RSS: Rome is on Fire

Last August, Marshall Kirkpatrick (another Portland resident) posted an entry to TechCrunch about a company called FeedCrier which:

… makes it easy to receive rapid notification of new items in an RSS feed by IM

I bookmarked the link on del.icio.us, noting offhandedly that it would probably be easy to do something like this using Wildfire and [...]

ROME and wfw namespace elements

I created a ROME parser and generator for wfw:comment and wfw:commentRss elements today. You can read all about it here and download the source code here.
Not sure what the wfw:comment or wfw:commentRss elements are for? Imagine you’re reading my blog in desktop aggregator and you want to post a comment to my blog. [...]

ROME and custom Generator elements

The majority of the articles I’ve seen on using ROME to create Atom and RSS feeds don’t show you how to customize the optional ‘generator’ element that both Atom and RSS support. It’s really easy. I’m assuming that you’ve already created and populated a SyndFeed instance:

SyndFeed feed = ..
WireFeedOutput feedOutput = new WireFeedOutput();
WireFeed wireFeed = [...]

OGNL: getter and setter types must match

Yesterday I ran into a interesting bug with the WebWork application I spend my waking hours working on, at least initially I thought it was a WebWork bug. I had a WebWork action with a getter / setter combination that looked like this:

public void setUser(String username) {
…
}
public User getUser() {
…
}

The thinking here was that if [...]

RSS/Atom feeds, Last Modified and Etags

Sometime last week I read this piece by Sam Ruby, which summarized says this:

…don’t send Etag and Last-Modified headers unless you really mean it. But if you can support it, please do. It will save you some bandwidth and your readers some processing.

The product I’ve been working on at work (which I should [...]

ROME, custom modules, publishdate and RSS

At work, I’ve taken on the work of migrating our RSS feeds currently being produced using JSP to ROME. Since we’ve added a few custom elements to the feeds available in Jive Forums (things like message and thread counts), I’m taking advantage of the feature in ROME that gives you the ability to programtically define [...]

JDJ: Mailets and Matchers

Remember back a couple months ago when I posted an article about using Apache James to implement VERP? Well, it actually did end up getting published in JDJ. If you subscribe to the magazine, you should have it in your hot little hands right now or you can visit the archives. If not, you’ll have [...]

AtomicInteger

A couple weeks ago I came across some code that used an instance of an AtomicInteger, which is part of the java.util.concurrent.atomic package, which I believe the majority of which was written by Doug Lea, author of the excellent util.concurrent library. I wrote the class name down in my todo.txt thinking that it would be [...]

XSL / CSS Processing Instructions using ROME

Have you seen the way that the smart guys at FeedBurner display RSS feeds in a browser (here’s a sample if you haven’t)? If you’re like me, the first time you see a feed they manage, you’ll probably think that you’re viewing a page that contains a link to an RSS or ATOM feed, not [...]

Hacking WebWork Result Types: Freemarker to HTML to JavaScript

I threw all of my past experience with Struts out the window when I started my new job because we use WebWork. WebWork is approximately one thousand times better though so I’m not complaining. One of the unique to WebWork features (as compared to Struts) is the notion of a result type which is [...]