Grab Headlines From A Remote RSS File

Retrieve Syndicated Content, Transform It, & Display The Result

In this article, Nick shows you how to retrieve syndicated content and convert it into headlines for your site. Since no official format for such feeds exists, aggregators are often faced with the difficulty of supporting multiple formats, so Nick also explains how to use XSL transformations to more easily deal with multiple syndication file formats.
With the popularization of weblogging, information overload is worse than ever. Readers now have more sites than ever to keep up with, and visiting all of them on a regular basis is next to impossible. Part of the problem can be solved through the syndication of content, in which a site makes its headlines and basic information available in a separate feed. Today, most of these feeds use an XML format called RSS, though there are variations in its use and even a potential competing format.

This article explains how to use Java technology to retrieve the content of a syndicated feed, determine its type, and then transform it into HTML and display it on a Web site. This process involves five steps:

1. Retrieve the XML feed
2. Analyze the feed
3. Determine the proper transformation
4. Perform the transformation
5. Display the result

This article chronicles the creation of a Java Server Page (JSP) that retrieves a remote feed and transforms it using a Java bean and XSLT, and then incorporates the newly transformed information into a JSP page. The concepts, however, apply to virtually any Web environment.