Sun Microsystems is beginning to forge a relationship
with Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary
(RSS).
The company said it will develop RSS for internal communications
within its company , as well as delivering external information
among developers, customers and partners. It will also integrate a
set of tools for its Java Desktop System and integrate the client
experience.
RSS is an XML-based format, often called a feed, that describes
content generated from a website generally in the form of news,
headline syndication or any type of published content and links to
the actual content are made available to other websites. After the
publishing site creates an RSS file of its content, other websites
may use the headline feed and the content can be read with a
standard web browser or any specialised RSS viewer.
“There is a whole class of communications in particular that
people use e-mail for that is more applicable to RSS…and a whole
range of news or support items that are much better aggregated and
delivered to the people who want to have access to them,” said John
Fowler, software chief technology officer at Sun.
“We believe that when you think things are going to be good they
are both sufficiently simple and sufficiently versatile to be used
for different types of things,” said Tim Bray, technical director
of Sun’s software group.
“We didn’t know all the things Java would be useful for and RSS
will go through some of these evolutions as well. We are perfectly
willing to do some exploration to see if we could really make this
useful for people.”
Bray said he would like to have an RSS feed to his bank account,
credit card and his stock market portfolio.
As the rise in blogging started to take off in recent years, it
became inconvenient for people to surf through those messages in a
traditional browser. So, RSS is an interesting alternative for
users to aggregate the activities of blogs and read them at their
own pleasure, Fowler added.
Developed in the late 1990s, RSS was used by Netscape to compete
with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer channels, which could push data
to users’ Windows 98 desktops.
Michael Gartenberg, vice-president and research director for the
Personal Technology and Access and Custom Research groups at
Jupiter Research, said the maturation of the RSS process is
obvious, to the point that suppliers such as Sun and Microsoft are
interested and recognise the significance of the file format. In
this case, however, it is not those companies that are driving the
standard.
“The fact that the major vendors are starting to get on board is
really interesting, but this has really been a grassroots
technology that has picked up a life of its own,” he said.
Fowler said Sun’s first few steps would be to develop a highly
integrated set of tools for JDS and also get involved in driving
open standards for RSS, something that Gartenberg said must
happen.
“This technology is mature, what you’re having right now is a
number of branches of the RSS community that are somewhat
fragmenting,” Gartenberg said. “It’s important that all these
groups get together and focus on one specification that works,
because if they don’t, one of the larger vendors will come into the
fray and set the standard.”
Right now there are several flavours of RSS such as Atom,
Google’s blogger service, various versions of the original RSS
standard, including a possible variant by Microsoft that might be
compatible with Longhorn, Gartenberg said.
Recently Dave Winer, a co-author of the original RSS format, who
said RSS is the newest thing that has been around for five years,
proposed a merger with Atom. He is also urging developers to come
up with a backwards-compatible format.
Sun’s Bray said the whole idea of syndication is what RSS and
Atom are all about. “It’s time for us to stop being a cottage
industry and start becoming a boring bureaucratic standard,” Bray
added.
Allison Taylor writes for ITWorldCanada