The Atom Format
In this lesson, we'll look at the Atom format.
We'll cover the following...
Introduction #
Atom is a data format originally developed to make blogs accessible to readers. An Atom document contains blog posts that subscribers can read in chronological order. Besides blogs, Atom can also be used for podcasts.
Because the protocol is so flexible, it is also suitable for other types of data.
- For example, a microservice can offer information about new orders to other microservices as an Atom feed. This corresponds to the REST approach, which uses established web protocols such as HTTP for the integration of applications.
Atom is not a protocol, but a data format.
A GET request to a new URL such as http://innoq.com/order/feed can return a document with orders in the Atom format. This document can contain links to the details of the orders.
MIME Type #
HTTP-based communication indicates the type of content with the help of MIME types (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions).
The MIME type for Atom is ...