Prolefeed

Prolefeed is a simple Clojure library for fetching RSS/Atom feeds and converting them to Clojure data structures.

It provides both simple feed fetching, and a scheduled background fetcher for situations where you want to stay up-to-date without needing to incur the overhead of an HTTP request each time you need to get the contents of a feed.

Prolefeed wraps the ROME library, which does all the heavy lifting related to feed fetching and parsing. It also uses the RomeFetcher library, which employs HTTP conditional GETs and GZip encoded feeds where possible. This minimizes the HTTP traffic required to fetch feeds.

Installation

The easiest way to install Prolefeed is using Leiningen. Add the following to your dependencies in project.clj:

[prolefeed "0.1-SNAPSHOT"]

Usage

To simply fetch a feed from a URL, call the fetch function:

(ns my-app
  (:require prolefeed))

(defn fetch-clojure-reddit []
  (prolefeed/fetch "http://www.reddit.com/r/clojure.rss"))

To schedule a regular retrieval of a feed, call add-feed. It returns a function which will always immediately return the latest fetched feed content, without causing an HTTP request:

(ns my-app
  (:require prolefeed))

(let [clojure-reddit (prolefeed/add-feed "http://www.reddit.com/r/clojure.rss")]
  (defn fetch-clojure-reddit []
    (clojure-reddit)))

By default the feed will be fetched every 5 minutes. You can also specify your own interval (in seconds), by giving it as a second argument to add-feed:

(prolefeed/add-feed "http://www.reddit.com/r/clojure.rss" 60)

The data structures returned will have the following form:

{:author "..."
 :copyright "..."
 :description "..."
 :language "..."
 :link "..."
 :publishedDate "..."
 :title "..."
 :uri "..."
 :entries ({:author "..."
            :link "..."
            :publishedDate "..."
            :title "..."
            :updatedDate "..."
            :uri "..."
            :description "..."
            :contents ("...", "...")})}

License

Copyright (C) 2010 Tero Parviainen

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License.