Threading extensions to the Atom Publishing Protocol

James Snell's bid to conquer the webiverse through the power of the Atom continues apace. His threading extension for Atom has been approved as a proposed standard for linking multiple entries/feeds in a threaded manner. See this post for his announcement, and, more interesting, his post on how to use the threading with Abdera, the Apache Atom parser.

Abdera Atom parser gone to Apache Incubator

James Snell's Abdera project has been accepted as an Incubator project by Apache. Abdera is a dedicated Java-based Atom parser. Unlike ROME, a similar project whose aim is to parse all sydication formats, including all versions of RSS and Atom, Abdera instead focuses on just on Atom, which seems to one major advantage - performance.

I've played around a bit with both ROME and Abdera, and they're both quite easy to use, with quite similar structures, obviously enough designed around the Atom sydication format. However, as Rob mentions, in some initial performance comparisons, you can see a reduction of from 10 to 40 times in memory consumption, and up to 8 or 9 times in CPU cycles, which is just massive.

Abdera is still very early on in development, but it's already gotten good documentation and examples, so I'm very impressed. Handy ice breaker for ApacheCon in a couple of weeks!