'Really simple syndication' looks set to provide users
with a short cut to the information they regularly need via the
internet.
If Soap and other web services standards seem like overkill for
your business purposes, help is on the way in the form of Really
Simple Syndication (RSS). And rather than originating from IBM and
Microsoft, it is a standard that has come to the fore, mainly
within the blogging community.
We have known that Microsoft was keen on RSS since it first
showed a demo of Longhorn two years ago. At the time, RSS was being
used to run a sidebar on the desktop. Since then, Microsoft's
ambitions have expanded considerably. It is now building a "feed
engine", or syndication platform, into the Longhorn applications
programming interface.
In this case RSS is just shorthand for a common type of service.
Microsoft said it plans to support RSS 1.0 and 2.0, the rival Atom
0.3 and 1.0 standards, and any other XML-based system that may
become widely used. If Atom is adopted as an internet standard,
there is no doubt Microsoft will support the final format.
RSS support obviously reflects the way blogging has taken off
inside Microsoft, with the public blessing of chief executive Steve
Ballmer. There are now more than 1,000 Microsoft bloggers, and if
you want to find out what is going on in the company, you have to
read Robert Scoble's Scobleizer, the various team blogs, and the
MSDN's Channel 9.
But RSS/Atom support in Longhorn has much wider implications
than blogging.
Microsoft intends to use RSS in applications such as Outlook and
Office, as well as in Internet Explorer. Microsoft also expects
third-party and corporate developers to use the RSS applications
programming interface in their own applications.
Microsoft has floated some fairly trivial examples. It has
suggested that, if you go to a conference, your calendar schedule
could be continuously updated by an RSS feed, or you could have a
regularly updated list of the top 20 downloads from a music site.
Grandparents could have a screen saver auto-updated with pictures
of their grandchildren as the parents post them to a photo-sharing
site, or a 'live' version of their kids' Amazon wish-lists.
Indeed, Microsoft sees syndication as the third main route to
information, the other two being browsing and searching. Once
end-users have found a source they value - whether for stock
prices, weather reports, photos, podcasts or sales figures - they
just have to subscribe to the feed and RSS will deliver updates
whenever they are published.
It is clear that there are lots of server-based applications
(not blogs) that could work by syndicating packets of XML data to
client applications (not RSS aggregators). These will not rival
Soap/web services as a system for executing transactions.
However, for companies that have not adopted Microsoft.net or
IBM's Websphere, they will provide a quick-and-dirty solution for
many tasks, with very little programming overhead. The applications
programming interface will do the heavy lifting.
Jack Schofield is computer editor at the Guardian