The recent foofaraw concerning WordPress’ laggardly progress towards providing Atom 1.0 support out of the box reminded me that I should update Ben Smedberg’s plugin, at least until I get around to installing “2.1.1” hereabouts.
Work continues on the Atom Publishing Protocol, and on implementations thereof. Sylvain Hellegouarch started a list of APP implementations. Since it also looks like APP support will be added to WordPress, it looks like we may be at or within a watershed moment for APP. Or maybe we passed one a while ago, and I just noticed. I’ll add to the above an informal listing of projects that are either nascent or about which I don’t know much:
- Dave Johnson brings news that an implementation based on ROME is in the works, which is all to the good.
- It seems that Python and Java hackers have taken the lead on APP, but there are what I hope are more than rumblings on RubyForge and
- … chatter on CPAN …
Out of all of these, I have only really used Apache Abdera so far. Although the API is in a bit of flux (early days yet), the fact that it’s currently implemented around AXIOM disposes me toward it favorably if you’re working entirely with Atom feeds and the APP and you’re going to process large feed documents. ROME is bound to JDOM, which means the whole XML document (including the overhead) has to be read into memory. OTOH, using ROME gives you the ability to transform your Atom feeds into other formats, and maybe your application would benefit from having the whole document in front of it.
The availability of in-browser implementations, such as Yulup, carries the promise of being able to quickly post to a lot of different blogs (or other content management systems) without having to visit a whole bunch of different web pages — at least when server-side APP support becomes widespread (on the Firefox extension front, see also Performancing, which is not APP-specific).