Writing an RSS reader in Java

Question

I'm trying to write a basic RSS reader for a class project. Our book shows an example by walking the DOM tree. Is that a decent approach for an RSS reader? Would I just ignore certain tags that are of uninterest to me and not to be used by the RSS Reader? Thanks.

Answer 1

For inspiration you can look at ROME, an open source tool for handling RSS & Atom feeds.

Answer 2

It's one of two common approaches, so yes. And yes, ignoring tags that are not of interest is a good way to handle it. If you don't need it, no need to take note of it. If you know in advance exactly what tags you need, you probably don't need to walk the entire DOM tree.

You could also use a SAX parser which would probably be faster and less memory intensive, though probably not necessary in this case, depending on how many results you wish to have in the feed.