Implementations of RFC3229 with "feed"

[Updated: 18-June-2006 to include support by Rawdog 2.9 aggregator]

This blog entry attempts to provide a catalog of systems that implement RFC3229 as described in my post on RFC3229+feed. I'm hoping that this will grow to be a very long list.

If we can get RFC3229 well and fully deployed in the blogging community, it is certain that we'll see quite a dramatic drop in the bandwidth requirements that result from polling for RSS and Atom files. While I'm convinced that eventually we'll have to leave the inefficiencies of polling behind and move syndication to a push model, in the meantime, we should be doing polling as well as we can.

Below, you'll find a list of servers and clients that support RFC3229.

Server or Content Management System (CMS) Support

• James E. Robinson, III was first to announce that he had built RFC3229 support -- as an extension to the popular Wordpress blogging system. He supports both "diffe" and "feed" instance manipulation.[LINK]. James also discovered a bug in Apache that prevents one from setting the "226 IM Used" response code. He has filed the bug and provided a patch. (Please vote for the patch...)
• Paul Burdick announced in a comment in my blog that he has upgraded the pMachine ExpressionEngine to support RFC3229.
• Garret Rooney has announced an Apache filter module which provides RFC3229 "feed" delta-encoding. Garret has also improved the patch to Apache originally filed by James E Robinson, III.
• Sam Ruby of IBM has updated his blog to support RFC3229 with feed and provides pointers to the cache.py python file where the magic happens.
• Jonas Luster told me last night that he's working on integrating support for RFC3229 with feed into Drupal. Jonas insisted that I not say *anything* about when it might be available... We also had fun talking about getting PubSub hooks built into Subversion...
• PubSub.com now supports RFC3229+feed for both RSS and Atom files and we're seeing dramatic decreases in bandwidth consumption already.
• Subtext 1.0 Nautilus Edition, released 2-Mar-2006, supports RFC3229+feed.

NOTE: Garret Rooney reports: "Justin Erenkrantz was nice enough to point out that even if Apache doesn't have support for the "226 IM Used" status code you can fake it up by manually setting the status_line in the request. This means you don't need to apply a patch to Apache to make use of this module." Thus, while Apache should still be patched to make this easier, it is quite possible to make it work with an unpatched version.

Client Support

• Mark Pilgrim announced support for RFC3229 "feed" in his widely used Universal Feed Parser. Thus, many systems, if they upgrade to include this new version will immediately support delta-encoding.[LINK]
• PubSub.com's feed crawlers and fetchers now make RFC3229-compliant "feed" requests.
• FeedDemon began testing support back in the fall and now officially includes it in V1.5.
• Mark Fletcher confirms that Bloglines has started to support RFC3229+feed. Sam Ruby has detected Bloglines' requests in his logs.
• Sam Ruby's logs show requests from NewzCrawler as well.
• Christian Adler reports that wTicker supports RFC3229 via 'A-IM: feeds since release 0.2.2.106
• [Oct 27] Nick Lothian reports that the Rome Fetcher now supports RFC3229 Delta-Encoded feeds (in CVS).
• [Nov 26] Omea Reader 1.0.2 now supports RFC3229+feed.
• [Mar 20] Dare Obasanjo reports: RSS Bandit v1.3.0.26 Released with RFC3229+feed support.
• [Aug 17 2005] Kevin Burton reports that Rojo supports RFC3229+feed.
• [Feb 01 2006] Microsoft announced that Windows RSS Platform (Vista) will support "server-friendly technologies like conditional GETs and RFC 3229 for feeds."
• [June 14 2006] Rawdog 2.9 now supports RFC3229+feed.

bob wyman

Comments

[Nick Bradbury]

Just wanted to add that support for RFC3229 via "A-IM: feed" will be included in the next build of FeedDemon.

[Garrett Rooney]

If you're interested in exploring more interaction between this sort of thing and Subversion let me know, in an alternate life I'm also a Subversion developer, so I may be able to help things along.

[Christian Adler]

Hello Bob

wTicker supports RFC3229 via 'A-IM: feeds since release 0.2.2.106.

Kind regards
Christian

[Roger Benningfield]

Bob: I've got something that I *think* works, but I'm still testing it to see how it functions in the wild.

(TRANSLATION: It works when I test it with cURL, and it *may* be working with Bloglines... still not certain. BL is definitely getting deltas, but I'm not sure that 304s are being returned on previously retrieved deltas.)

Assuming everything is stable, I'll roll out the code across all JournURL communities... right now, it's only installed for my tech blog. FWIW, I was finally able to hack my way around the server-side caching issues that I mentioned on atom-syntax. The resulting code ain't pretty, but it runs.

Oh, and I can confirm spotting of an RFC3229-aware version of Newzcrawler... looks like it may be an unreleased beta, but it definitely hit my blog and supplied an A-IM header.

[Dmitry Jemerov]

Omea Reader 1.0.2 also supports RFC3229:
http://www.jetbrains.com/omea_reader/

[Garrett Rooney]

Looks like Geoff Young just committed the patch adding the HTTP_IM_USED constant and "226 IM Used" status line to Apache.

http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs?view=rev&rev=111386

[zyje]

thanks for this:)

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