Harvesting News with DOMIT! RSS

Released on = September 8, 2004, 11:48 am

Press Release Author = Thomas Mitchell

Press Release Summary = New Open Source tool makes gathering electronically
syndicated information less complicated.

Press Release Body = “You can use a combine to harvest wheat,” said John Heinstein,
VP of Software Development for Engage Interactive. “But you wouldn’t use it to
harvest apples or blueberries. In a sense, the same holds true for harvesting
information. You use a web browser to gather information from a news web site (e.g.,
Wired News – the online edition of Wired) but you would need a completely different
tool to harvest information from an RSS feed.”

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) feed is a popular XML-based
format for the online syndication of content such as news articles and serialized
novels. “The problem is,” said Mr. Heinstein, “there are several different versions
of RSS and they all work differently. It’s messy and difficult to work with all
these different formats.”

The DOMIT! RSS parser is an Open Source object-oriented PHP library designed to
facilitate the task of extracting content from all types of RSS feeds in a uniform
manner. “It provides a simple programming interface for gathering common RSS
elements such as the title, URL and description of the content,” said Mr. Heinstein,
“as well as the more esoteric RSS elements and user-defined tags”.

“This tool introduces a structure for thinking about RSS programmatically,” said Mr.
Heinstein, “without having to master all the subtle differences between RSS
versions.”

DOMIT! RSS also has an integrated caching system that stores local copies of RSS
feeds. “These are refreshed only at those intervals specified by the user,” said Mr.
Heinstein, “thereby conserving bandwidth and leading to faster response times.”
works with non-conformant XML.

DOMIT! RSS is built on DOMIT!, a DOM-based XML parser. This allows access to the RSS
data using the standardized DOM API, in addition to the specialized DOMIT! RSS API.

DOMIT! RSS is released under the LGPL license, which means that it can be
incorporated into commercial software, as long as the DOMIT! RSS source code is made
available and the license statement is left intact.

DOMIT! RSS is available free of charge at
http://www.engageinteractive.com/mambo/index.php?option

Web Site = http://www..engageinteractive.com/domitrss/

Contact Details = Thomas Mitchell, Director of Business Development
921 College Hill Road
Fredericton, NB
Canada, E3B 6Z9
Phone: 506-460-1628
Fax: 506-460-1626
Email: tmitchell@engageinteractive.com
URL: www.engageinteractive.com