JNN: the Juicy News Network
It's been a log time since I last wrote a blog entry: I'll try to
pick up the pace and be more regular. I did a little "weekend hack"
and did an
RSS feed reader that goes by the rather goofy
name of JNN, the "Juicy News Network". If you'd like to try it out,
it's available via
JNLP here. It's an
open source project on java.net, it's home is
http://jnn.dev.java.net. All the sources are there, as
well as a JAR file that works on any platform, and a Mac OS X
installation. I comes with a preset list of subscriptions. You can
unsubscribe to news feeds by using the "unsubscribe" menu entry.
You can subscribe to feeds by using drag-and-drop of RSS URLs or
HTML pages with rss+xml links. There's a "Help" page that explains
it all. The application itself is pretty straightforward. The most
interesting thing is what it does to be fast at startup: all news
feed reading is done by a swarm of low priority threads, one for
each feed. So all feeds get fetched in parallel. This is very easy
to do in Java: the threading API and networking support made it all
straightforward.
