General Discussions

**Kane Hill** · 10:10 PM

Ok, I see stuff about and I looked it up and I understand that it brings in content. But where do I get one? Who here uses it and could offer some advice on a place to get one and how to implement it.

Thanks for your help-Kane

**Minaki** · 06-12-2006, 10:21 AM

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's basically just a standardised way of communicating news articles. An RSS feed is simple an XML document conforming to the RSS 2.0 Specification. There are loads of tools available for creating and consuming RSS feeds in different ways. (I found the easiest way to create an RSS feed for my site was to just create the XML file on the fly from my database using the .NET classes in the System.XML Namespace)
Here's my example:
http://surreyangels.jodoshared.com/newsfeed.aspx

The feed can then be consumed by anone with a news reader. Firefox has an RSS news reder, and you can put custom news feeds on things such as personalised Google home pages.

I find the main benifit is that it gives people a good reason to come back to your site - when you release a new news article, it will flag up on their newsreader and remind them of your site and let them know it is still active.

**ibbo** · 06-12-2006, 10:45 AM

Dont these feeds fall under web services with .NET, indeed are they not classed as services throughout the web world.

Ibbo

**Minaki** · 06-13-2006, 04:43 AM

No, web services are different - a web service is a class library exposed to the web through SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), which is based on XML. With SOAP, remote hosts can call functions on the server through HTTP and XML.

**stOx** · 06-13-2006, 05:11 AM

The FF live bookmarks is awesome.
Everyone with a site should impliment an RSS feed and put the "live bookmarks" icon in thier address bar for people to subscribe.

**ibbo** · 06-13-2006, 05:17 AM

It all sounds very close to be able to seperate to me. While RSS may not be accessed over SOAP technology (normall) it still produces and XML response (data).

Sure you can do much more via SOAP but its basic function is the same as an rss feed in so much as it is proving data of some sort or other.

Or is it.

Thats the problem you see, so many things do exactly (or almost the same thing) yet they get different brands and names leaving confusion in their wake.

Take SOAP for instace, nicked from RPC and renamed SOAP but it is infact simply RPC in as much as it works along the lines "I ask you give". Remarkably like an http request or infact anyother network based request based on hit and hope request).

They are all RPC yet in seperate areas that have been renamed and covered in chocalate and icing.

Sure they may have an extra button or two these days but that changes little.

Ibbo

**Minaki** · 06-14-2006, 05:01 AM

Well, not really.

SOAP and RSS are simular in the way that they are both based on XML. However, the schema for RSS files and SOAP files is vastly different, because they are used for different things.

RSS is mainly used for news feeds, and is usually implemented into news readers and such. SOAP is simular to RPC, however it is based on XML and HTTP, meaning it's platform independant and works more easily through firewalls. It's not really used for news feeds, it's mainly used for applications to communicate, for example a web application may use SOAP to call a function from a shipping website passing parameters such as the weight and destination of the package to receive a shipping cost. This is far different from a news feed. Also, news feeds usually don't take any parameters since they don't process anything, they are just semi static documents.

**ibbo** · 06-14-2006, 06:57 AM

Ive played with various RPC technologies and while they vary from app to app they still rely on the old RPC technology.

My point been that why have some many differnt names for whats essentially the same thing. It happens with everything in computing. 1 technology ends up with ten differnt names and leads to massive confusion.

Personally ive worked with SOAP RSS XML, ive coded in C using rpcgen and I can vouch that its nothing but RPC with multiple names.

Herein lies confusion.

Using rpcgen I could nock up a news feed program or a nice API to return class information. Its still RPC and will take params or no params thats not an issue. The issue is splitting it apart and renaming the componets (params or no params) into seprate entities like RSS or SOAP.

No wonder computing seems dauniting to new people.

Ibbo

**Minaki** · 08:31 AM

I don't understand the confusion... it's really simple.

There's no point in putting them all under the same umbrella because they're different standards used for different things. Yes, there are some fundemental simularities and it's those simularities that make them 'standards'.

RPC is a bit of an abstact technology, as is SOAP. To consume a SOAP service or RPC endpoint, you need to know the details of what you're calling, since SOAP can be used for almost anything.

RSS is not so abstract. You don't need to know any additional details to consume an RSS feed - you just need to know the URL, and you know that you're going to get an XML document back that conforms to a set schema. This works for RSS - it's simple to use, but it's not flexible like SOAP is. but the fact is it's a news feed - it doesn't need to be any more flexible.

Yes, you could implement a newsfeed with SOAP or even RPC, but because they are abstract technologies, you would then have to implement your own way of outputting the feed. Someone else might do the same but with their own names for parameters and result values. An RSS reader would then have to know this additional information to be able to consume these news feeds. That's impracticle for an end user. They just want a URL.

At the end of the day, it's apples & oranges.