JAggregator

JAggregator fits in the new category of applications called "News Aggregator". A news aggregator pulls news stories, weblog content, stock informations and other XML-based content from the web and presents it to the user. There already exist a couple of aggregators, both commercial and free/open-sourced. Prominent examples are Radio Userland (commercial, desktop based), AmphetaDesk (open source, desktop based) and my.yahoo.com (free, web based).

Plattform and architecture

JAggregator is developed with Java 1.3. It supports -- theoretically -- every plattform with a Java Virtual Machine version 1.3 and higher. Practically, support for Linux and Windows is guaranteed. For other plattforms we might rely on support from users and future developers.

JAggregator utilizes a couple of {jakarta|xml}.apache.org's fantastic libraries: commons-digester, commons-collections, Xerces and Velocity (among others). While it is built with web technologies, it's main use is on the desktop.

JAggregator consists of several components:

  1. A powerful, easily extendable and well designed RSS library that promotes reuse. It understands the RSS versions 0.91, 0.92, 1.0 and 2.0 together with the extension modules mod_content, mod_dc and mod_syndication.

    Integration of new modules or XML formats is a fairly straight forward task.

    Third party developer can use the library in their own projects.

  2. An HTML page generator. The generator is built around the Velocity templating engine. Page templates provide the flexibility to customize layout and behavior of the generated pages. User can plugin their own templates and java classes to influence page generation.

  3. In the future, JAggregator will incorporate a HTTP server. The webserver will be used for two tasks: serving the generated HTML pages and providing an interface for the user to interact with JAggregator at runtime. Users will use this interface to subscribe to news channels, delete, archive or search for news items etc.

Availability

At this point, we don't have

Summary

JAggregator runs in the background, fetches content from the web and generates HTML pages for viewing them in a web browser, thus allowing the user to build her/his own personalised portal with news stories, stock and weather information and much more.

Links

Dave Winer "What is a News Aggregator":
http://davenet.userland.com/2002/10/08/whatIsANewsAggregator
RSS 0.91, 0.92, 2.0:
http://backend.userland.com/rss
RSS 1.0:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files
Radio Userland:
http://radio.userland.com
AmphetaDesk:
http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk

SourceForge.net Logo
We would like to thank SourceForge.net for hosting JAggregator.

Page created: January 19, 2003
last changed: January, 19, 2003 by JSZ