From Developer Community

A big part of simplifying application development is the availability of the right kind of information. Providing that information on the web is a key part of this effort to make information available. This wiki is a further step in that direction, where the information is able to change quickly and adapt itself to the needs of Novell as well as to those of the community.

A next step in this evolution is to get information in front of developers that are interested in it, without them having to remember to look for it all the time. News feed technology accomplishes this step by allowing people to subscribe to feeds of interest to them.

Types of Feeds

A few different types of feeds can be made available to complete this offering.

1. Category Feeds generated from defined categories on this wiki, delivering content that belongs to that category. This may include new articles in a category as well as changes to existing articles in a category.
2. Update Feeds generated to summarize changes to a page. This page could be a project page or an article page, for example.
3. Author Feeds generated on a per-author basis. This allows users to subscribe to all articles by a particular author, if they find one particularly interesting.
4. Individual Feeds generated specifically for a user. These feeds would require authentication, and could be used to deliver messages intended only for the specific user - messages such as new bugs assigned, Subversion commits, etc.

Items 1, 2, and 3 can probably be handled by WikiFeeds. WikiFeeds can generate several different types of both RSS and ATOM feeds from MediaWiki - see this page for some examples. Minor modifications could be made to WikiFeeds if necessary - it is open source under the GNU LGPL License.

For items 2 and 3, pages and users, respectively, would want to include links to help people subscribe to page changes or new author pages. New tags could be created in our tag library to simplify this.

Item number 4 will probably require some different coding. One possible route to deliver item number 4 is the Atommail project, which generates ATOM feeds from a POP3 mail account.

Receiving Feeds

There are a number of existing feed readers for reading RSS and ATOM feeds, available for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.

We will deliver an additional feed reader, but not because the others are inadequate. This feed reader will be an Eclipse plugin where the user can subscribe to feeds, whether from Novell or from any other source, that they would like to receive directly into their IDE. For feed content that is developer related, this offers the advantage of delivering the content directly into a tool like the IDE, so users don't have to switch from one application to another as they read an article with sample code describing how to bind to an LDAP directory in Python, for example.

Another possible, future advantage of such a feed reader is that we could someday generate content of other MIME types besides text/plain or text/html. For example, it might be possible to generate feed content, where an entry in a feed is not an article but a project. The feed reader can interpret the entry correctly and allow the user to open the project directly in their IDE.

This last part is not currently a part of the feature scope, but is a possible feature for a later date. However, the feed reader plugin is in development and should be expected soon.

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