Atom Caching

Tools #

At https://validator.w3.org/feed/#validate_by_input, a validator is provided that can check whether an Atom feed is valid, checking to see if all necessary elements are present.

There are systems such as Atom Hopper that offer a server with the Atom format. In this way, an application does not have to generate Atom data, but can post new data to the server. The server then converts the information into Atom. Clients can fetch the Atom data from the server.

Efficient polling of Atom feeds #

Asynchronous communication with Atom requires that the client regularly requests the data from the server and processes new data. This is called polling.

The client can periodically read out the feed and check the updated field in the feed to see if the data has changed. If this is the case, the client can use the updated elements of the entries to find out which entries are new and process them.

This is very time consuming because the entire feed has to be generated and transmitted. Additionally, only a few entries are read from the feed, most requests will show that there are actually no new entries. For this purpose, it does not make ...