Simple RSS Service 0.3 review

The Simple RSS Service (SRSSS) generates and serves RSS feeds through a common interface via CGI-enabled webservers

License: BSD License File size: 470K Developer: Ola Eriksson

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The Simple RSS Service (SRSSS) generates and serves RSS feeds through a common interface via CGI-enabled webservers. It uses modules to extract items for feeds from various sources, and has a virtual filesystem where feeds can be read by CGI-clients.

The package contains everything needed to start providing RSS feeds, including server and CGI programs, and has support for PostgreSQL, MySQL and MimerSQL.

Here are some key features of "Simple RSS Service":
Modular and clean design based on object oriented C++
Resource-friendly functions that keeps the load down on web- and database-servers by only parsing data and generate new feeds when required, instead of at every request.
Interface for run-time loading of modules for data-extraction
A virtual filesystem stored in shared memory
Feed extraction via CGI program for easy integration in any CGI-enabled webserver
A trigger-system that allows external sources to trigger daemon software to fetch new updates
Easy configuration via a configfiles
Designed for easy integration towards SQL servers etc
Support for NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux.


Modules:

These modules are currently available for RSS item extraction:

mod_pgsql

This module allows the RSS daemon (rssd) to extract items for RSS feeds from a PostgreSQL database. It can select an entire column as description field for the feed, or base it on a pre-formated string in which variables are replaced with values from columns returned in the SQL query.

This module also support triggering, where any client connected to the same database is able to trigger RSSD to fetch a new update via the SQL LISTEN and NOTIFY functions.

mod_mysql

This module integrates RSSD with the MySQL database, allowing it to produce RSS feeds based on any information stored in databases running on MySQL. The module allows the user to run just about any SQL query supported by the database to extract the needed information to create a feed.

Mod_mysql does also support pre-formated strings to generate the description for each RSS item it produces.

mod_mimersql

This module allows the RSS daemon to fetch items from the MimerSQL database.

The module allows the user to run just about any SQL query supported by the database to extract the needed information to create a feed.

Mod_mimersql does also support pre-formated strings to generate the description for each RSS item it produces.

mod_template

This is a template-module that can be used as a starting-point when developing new modules. It is usable, but does not really provide a usable feature.