Consuming Rss Feeds With Cold Fusion

Consuming RSS Feeds With ColdFusion ColdFusion Programming doesn't seem to get the respect it deserves amongst the dedicated Java or .NET or even PHP development circles, but having worked in all of those environments, I'd like to state for the record, that completing a large scale development project AHEAD of schedule, keeping your Business Managers and Projects Managers happy, and let's not forget the most important of all... THE CLIENT...Well, that's priceless. Well worth any investment made towards ColdFusion. Web services, RSS, XML, SOAP to name several, are all welcomed friends to the ColdFusion web development language. This article will focus on the likes of RSS and XML. Definition: RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Consumers of RSS content use special browsers called aggregators to watch for new content in dozens or even hundreds of web feeds. The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards: Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel". That's the Wikipedia definition for an RSS feed. What's not mentioned is that developers are able to take advantage of the content provided by these RSS feeds to display current and changing data on their websites, which adds value to the website and hopefully bring return visitors for more of the information that you provide. Consuming an RSS feed in ColdFusion can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. There are several ways or more, to do this in ColdFusion. Parsing through array elements and defining the parent elements to children and testing for grandchildren elements, and recursive behaviors etc. But this article is not for the experienced ColdFusion developer. This article is for someone who might like to see some of the "ease of operation" of ColdFusion and how it relates to a popular web practice known as RSS. It's a feed that I have implemented on several of my websites. Now it's important to note that you

should select feeds that are relevant to your website, I have several music based websites and thus having an "Album Review" feed was appropriate. Ok, so now what do we do with this feed you ask? Well, basically there are only 3 steps to consuming and parsing an XML/RSS feed. 1. Read the Feed in 2. Loop through the elements of the feed 3. Display the feed Am I simplifying things a bit? Not really, the purpose here is to show how ColdFusion can do much of the 'heavy lifting' as it pertains to application development making many day to day programming tasks much less tedious. As you can see displaying an RSS feed in ColdFusion is easy and provides real time up to date information that you can provide to your visitors on your website. You can apply style sheets and html formatting to your feeds and present the information in a pleasant looking way that visitors will enjoy reading. For More Information Please Visit A-1 Technology Article Source: Ezine Articles

Consuming Rss Feeds With Cold Fusion

by A1 Technology on Nov 24, 2009

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