Conclusion & Resources

There are many Python tools for RSS, and we don't have space to cover them all. Aaron Swartz's page of RSS tools is a good place to start looking if you want to explore other modules out there. RSS is easy to work with in Python, because of all the great modules available for it. The modules hide all the chaos brought about by the history and popularity of RSS. If your XML services needs mostly involve the exchange of descriptive information for Web sites, we highly recommend using the most successful XML service technology in employment.

Next month, we will explain how to use e-mail packages for Python for writing Web services over SMTP.

• Participate in the discussion forum on this article. (You can also click Discuss at the top or bottom of the article to access the forum.)
  
  
• Check out the previous installments of The Python Web services developer columns.
  
  
• There are several resources on RSS in IBM developerWorks.
  • An introduction to RSS news feeds, by James Lewin, is older, but a good place to start. It covers RSS 0.91 and 1.0, and Perl interfaces. (developerWorks, November 2000)
  • Grab headlines from a remote RDF file, by Nicholas Chase, shows some XSLT and JSP code for processing RSS 0.91 and 1.0. (developerWorks, April 2002)
  
  
• XML.com also has several articles on RSS. Read RSS: Lightweight Web Syndication, by Rael Dornfest, for a good general introduction. In Building a Semantic Web Site, Eric van der Vlist provides an great technical introduction based on very practical examples. RSS Modularization, by Leigh Dodds, follows some very interesting conversation at a crucial juncture in RSS development.
  
  
• Mark Nottingham is the author of RSS.py, and has a lot of other handy stuff on his home page, including an excellent RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters.
  
  
• Mark Pilgrim is the author of rssparser.py, an "ultra liberal" RSS parser. The code is available as a text download. If you install it, I also recommend getting timeoutsocket.py.
  
  
• Fredrik Lundh, the author of xmlrpclib.py and soaplib.py, is working on The EffNews Project: Building an RSS Newsreader, a python project for creating a GUI front end for reading news from RSS feeds.
  
  
• Peerkat is a resource aggregator written in Python that allows people to use RSS to manage the Web content they follow.
  
  
• Aaron Swartz maintains a list of RSS tools for all languages and platforms.