Re: [syndication] ICE, RSS, SOAP

[Bill Humphries <bill@whump.com>]

On Wednesday, April 17, 2002, at 03:18 AM, Pauline GUEZENNEC wrote:

> Hello,
>  
> I would like to know the differences between ICE and RSS. I have read 
> that RSS is simpler than ICE. But what are the main differences between 
> those 2?
>  
> I would also like to know which one is better for syndication and 
> agregation. Could SOAP be used too?

I'll take a stab at this one. I wish I still had that summary I'd written 
for OnRadio's management back in 1999... I'd just post that.

Anyway,

RSS: consider this as a list of items, what's on the menu, most of the 
time the payload in an RSS file is a URL.

ICE: this is a container of things and rules for using them expressed in 
XML, instead of just pointers to things, so instead of saying "this is 
what's on the menu today" you could be sending the thing itself (an 
article, an update to a catalog) along with parameters on its use (this 
article should only run from 17 Apr to 1 May, this replaces the content at 
URI http://...)

SOAP: this is a wrapper for making remote procedure calls, so from a 
program you might say "connect to the server at foo.com and run the method 
getNewArticles(topic = "XML")" the program generates the equivalent XML 
message and sends it to foo.com (most of the time this is over http) which 
reads the XML and processes the request, wraps up the response in XML and 
sends it back to the calling program on your machine which takes the XML 
and turns it back into the data structure you're using (arrays, record 
sets, objects...).

So the relationship between SOAP and ICE could be: you call getNewArticles(
) from your program/publishing system/whatever, and the machine at foo.com 
sends all those new articles on XML back as an ICE document which your 
system consumes.

Again you don't need SOAP for that, foo.com could support the URL 
http://foo.com/getNewArticles?topic=XML which returns the ICE document.

You could send RSS over SOAP, but that's overkill, since most sites make 
RSS available over HTTP already.

As to your question of what's best? Well, that depends on what you're 
doing. If you're aggregating headlines, RSS will do much of what you want.
 If you want to receive or send content, and need to provide meta 
information on how to use it (where does it go, etc.) then ICE may make 
more sense.

SOAP, again, is orthogonal to this, as it's just a wire protocol and if 
you use it depends on the tools you're using.

----
Bill Humphries <bill@whump.com>
http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/