Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

19.1Creating a News Feed

There is a Seaside package extension that helps us to build such feeds in a manner similar to what we used to build XHTML for component rendering. Let’s create a news feed for our todo items.

Define the Feed Component. The package defines a root class named RRComponent that allows you to describe both the news feed channel (title, description, language, date of publication) and also the news items. Therefore, the next step is to create a new subclass of RRComponent named ToDoRssFeed. This will be the entry point of our feed generator. In our example, we don’t need extra instance variables.

RRComponent subclass: #ToDoRssFeed
instanceVariableNames: ''
classVariableNames: ''
poolDictionaries: ''
category: 'ToDo-RSS'

Register the Component as Entry Point. Next we need to register the component at a fixed URL. The aggregator will use this URL to access the feed. We do this by adding a class side initialize method. Don’t forget to evaluate the code.

ToDoRssFeed class>>initialize
(WAAdmin register: RRRssHandler at: 'todo.rss')
rootComponentClass: self

At this point we can begin to download our feed at http://localhost:8080/todo.rss, however it is mostly empty except for some standard markup as shown by the following RSS file.

Your browser may be set up to handle RSS feeds automatically, so you may have difficulty in examining the raw source.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
    <channel>
    </channel>
</rss>

Copyright © 19 March 2024 Stéphane Ducasse, Lukas Renggli, C. David Shaffer, Rick Zaccone
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