* Project RSSBus from /n software
RSS (which stands for Real Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Summary) is becoming a fundamental mechanism for publishing and exchanging data. In this newsletter, we’ve covered a number of RSS-related tools for creating, editing, and even mixing RSS feeds. Today, we have a project that takes RSS feeds even further and generalizes the interfacing and feed content creation to enable any data source to become an RSS feed generator.
The project is called RSSBus from /n software: “RSSBus enables you to easily add an RSS-based API to your Web site, other servers, or your desktop. It allows you to employ RSS feeds as a simple integration tool for distributed applications, making automation and integration easier and more accessible.”
RSSBus (which the authors say stands for “Really Simple Service Bus”) consists of Windows services that use RSS 2.0 as an interchange mechanism for any type of data.
The inputs and outputs of RSSBus are via operations, which are high-level functions that implement various data transfers such as sending a GET request to a Web server or getting a range of cells from an Excel worksheet. Specific operations are provided for interactions with commercial services such as PayPal, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, UPS, Fedex and Yahoo; as well as generic ones such as files, POP, IMAP, SMTP and HTTP. You can modify the existing operations as well as create your own.
The authors explain this process: “Each operation is configured to receive input at one or more Web locations (HTTP endpoints). The RSSBus Engine is responsible for reading the HTTP input, converting it into a form suitable for operation input, passing the input to the operation, invoking the operation logic, and then formatting (or serializing) the result as a Feed.”
RSSBus connects and manipulates feeds through RSBScript and a simple XML-based scripting language. Scripting allows you to pass items as input to operations (other feeds) that produce a new collection of items (a feed).
To visualize feeds, RSSBus provides templates and RSBPanel Control, a Microsoft ASP.Net specific mechanism (support for other languages and environments is planned).
Templates are built from RSBScript combined with text, HTML, or XML allowing you to output a feed in whatever form you need using minimal coding.
The RSSBus White Paper clarifies some of the design and functional issues. The free Desktop Edition of RSSBus has an embedded Web server that will only honor requests from a local host, while the Server Edition requires IIS and the purchase of a license (pricing will not be set until the full release, until the beta is free to use).
