We are excited to announce that RSSBus Feed Server has been nominated for the 2008 Great Indian Developer Awards in the Web Development category.  The RSSBus team is honored to be nominated for this award, and we are excited to be recognized across the globe for facilitating feed generation and enabling connected systems through simple services.

This nomination "highlights product excellence, research and innovation, corporate achievements, the strongest individual efforts, and the most compelling community efforts among the entire IT developer fraternity in India."  For complete details visit the 2008 Great Indian Developer Summit website - http://www.developersummit.com/awards.html

We are proud to announce that RSSBus Feed Server has received the Jolt Productivity Award in the ‘Web Development Tools’ category at the 18th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards (www.joltawards.com).  

Jolt Awards are presented annually to products, books, and websites that have "jolted" the industry over the past year, helping create faster, easier and more efficient software.  The Jolt Product Awards recognize only the most innovative, trend-making, and ahead-of-the-curve software solutions.  Winners are selected by an esteemed panel of judges consisting of industry insiders, columnists, and technology leaders.

For more information about the 2008 Jolt Awards - http://www.joltawards.com/press/030608.htm

We are proud to announce that RSSBus Feed Server has been nominated as a finalist for the upcoming 18th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards (www.joltawards.com) in the ‘Web Development Tools’ category.   The Jolt awards is widely considered the “Oscar's of the software industry”, recognizing only the most innovative, trend-making, and ahead-of-the-curve software solutions.  The entire RSSBus team feels honored to be considered for this highly prestigious industry award.
 
Stay tuned, winners will be announced March 5 at SDWest in Santa Clara, CA.

We are happy to announce that RSSBus Desktop V1 has received the official 'thumbs-up' from our QA team and is now available for download.  RSSBus Desktop is a FREE, full-featured version of RSSBus designed for individual Desktop use.

RSSBus Desktop enables users to harness the integration potential of RSSBus Connectors directly from the Windows desktop.  With RSSBus Desktop, users can create and configure local RSS feeds for individual consumption, aggregate and manipulate external feeds, process and pipeline items, and much more.  In addition, RSSBus Desktop provides an excellent platform for testing and configuring feeds before deployment to RSSBus Feed Server.

Once again we would like to thank the countless testers who have provided us with their valuable feedback throughout the RSSBus Desktop Betas. 

To download the RSSBus Desktop V1 release, go to - http://www.rssbus.com/download/. 

After more than 18 months in public beta and extensive testing and feedback, the first official release of the RSSBus Feed Server is finally here!  The QA team has given their seal of approval, and today we are very excited to announce that the RSSBus Feed Server is officially released and shipping. 

The RSSBus Feed Server is available immediately from the RSSBus online store at http://www.rssbus.com/order/. 

Licensing is based on the number of server CPUs where the Feed Server is the configured to run. Pricing starts at $999.00 for a single CPU, with support for an unlimited number of Feeds, Users, and RSSBus Connectors.  Additional pricing and licensing options can be found on the online ordering page. 

For developers, hobbyists, and non-commercial users, we plan to soon make available a Free Community Edition of the RSSBus Feed Server through our community outreach program.  Except for some branding restrictions, the Community Edition will include the same great features as the full version.  Let us know if you are interested in obtaining early access to this program.

We want to thank all our supporters for providing valuable feedback, both directly through tradeshows, email, and phone calls, and indirectly through blogs and press.  We are encouraged that so many of you share our vision of simple services and are excited to offer the RSSBus Feed Server as a stepping stone towards fulfillment of that vision.

• Read the Press Release
• Download a Time-Limited Trial Version
• Learn more about RSSBus

While putting the finishing touches on the RSSBus Feed Server our development team has been working in parallel on the Java edition of RSSBus.  This flavor of RSSBus is an almost identical implementation in pure Java, including the same powerful connectors, feed generation, and pipelining capabilities of its Windows/.NET counterpart.  In addition, the Java edition enables an entirely new set of connectors able to take advantage of libraries available only in Java.   

The new Java version of RSSBus is nearing completion and we would like to invite you to take part in the upcoming private beta release.  If you are interested, please sign up <here> and a member of our team will send download instructions as soon as the private beta is available. 

We have received tremendous feedback from Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X users interested in RSSBus and we are excited to have a full-featured Java version. 

It’s official - The RSSBus Feed Server is feature complete! If you have been waiting for the release candidate to start integrating data with feeds, the time is now.

Since the previous Beta RSSBus has been updated with significant performance enhancements, updates for security and scalability, and functional enhancements to the admin console to makes feed creation, publishing, and integration easier than ever.

New in RC1

• Feed Creation Wizard – The RSSBus Admin UI has been enhanced with a new Feed creation wizard that takes all of the guesswork out of creating and exposing feeds. The wizard walks you through the process of exposing input and output parameters as well as configuring security for your feeds.
  
• Enhanced Logging – RSSBus has been improved with fully customizable logging facilities to monitor feed info, feed access, and connector errors.
  
• Caching and Improved Performance – Caching has been available in RSSBus for some time, however this release includes support for Etag and if-modified-since for cached feeds reducing bandwidth and increasing performance.
  
• RSSBus Users Guide – Need a better overview of RSSBus? The new RSSBus users guide includes everything you neet to know about setting up RSSBus including installation of the Feed Server, administration, security, and development. To receive a copy of the user’s guide, download the latest RC1 release of RSSBus Feed Server.
  
• New Connectors & Connector Updates - All RSSBus Connectors have bee updated with new enhancements in accessibility and performance for this release.  New connectors are also available targeting new technologies such as BiztalkOps, DbaseOps, OledbOps, PgsqlOps, TwitterOps, and more!

Thank you

We could not have achieved this milestone without the support and feedback of all of our beta testers. The quality of feedback that we have received has been instrumental, guiding our development efforts towards important enhancements in security, usability, and scalability.  Stay tuned for the RTM announcement in the next few weeks!

To check out RSSBus RC1 download: RSSBus Feed Server.

Andy Dorman, Senior Editor for Network Computing, recently attended the Enterprise 2.0 2007 conference in Boston and has created 6 categories that define Enterprise 2.0 : RSS Enablement, Office Suites, Blogs and Wikis, Tagging and Social Bookmarking, and Web 2.0 appliances. 

RSSBus is, of course, listed in the RSS Enablement category.  Andy writes:

"Most intranets are fairly Spartan affairs, at least compared with the sum total of an organization's knowledge. There's an untapped wealth of data contained within spreadsheets and text files, and it's that information that service-enablement vendors aim to expose. The concept is similar to service enablement for SOA, but hugely simplified so that no development skills are necessary. Instead of converting APIs to SOAP or other Web services, these apps convert files or Web pages to RSS feeds.” [more]

This is exactly what RSSBus is all about.  Through the extensible connector architecture, RSSBus can pull data from any data source and produce “feeds” of RSS 2.0 data.  RSSBus can then filter, sort, combine, and manipulate RSS, or even pipe feeds to other RSSBus entry points (connectors or scripts).

Ian Oeschger, an Information Architect for IBM Web Sphere, recently wrote about the integrative potential of RSSBus:

“The RSSBus software, in desktop or server flavor, consumes RSS and makes data available and manipulable uniformly -- spreadsheets and other corporate data, netflix new releases, chat messages, ftp sessions, eventful and other calendar items, and anything else you can build a connector for using their APIs.”  [more]

And speaking of RSSBus connectors, are you interested in building connectors so that the applications you use can "speak" RSS?  Drop us an email at info@rssbus.com and tell us what systems you want to connect to. We may already have the connector you are looking for, or we may be able to point you to a third party who is working on the connector you are interested in.

If you happen to be in Las Vegas this week please stop by the RSSBus Booth at Interop Las Vegas 2007. Members of the RSSBus team will be exhibiting in the Web 2.0 pavilion and would love to meet with you and hear feedback. In fact, drop off your business card and we'll even send you a free single server license of RSSBus Feed Server.    

In the latest "Interviews with Innovators" podcast at ITConversations, Jon Udell takes and in-depth look at RSSBus and the value of using feeds as simple services:

"By normalizing all data feeds to "flattened" sets of name/value pairs, RSSBus trades away some of the power of advanced data modeling in order to reach a broad population of developers - and even, ideally, ordinary information workers who will be able to pull feeds into their spreadsheets, combine and filter them, and publish their transformed feeds back out to the Net."

RSSBus will be at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo from April 15-18 in San Francisco.  If you are there, stop by our booth in the exhibit hall and say "hello"! 

Here is a version of an RSSBus introduction video that we showed at the O'Reilly ETech conference, which we'll also have up at the booth at the Web 2.0 Expo.  The video shows some examples of useful feeds that you can create with a few clicks of the mouse using RSSBus. 

A new version update, RSSBus Beta 4c, is now available - just in time for next week's O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference.  This update includes core engine performance enhancements, updates to the shipping RSSBus connectors, new sample scripts, and a new profile provider model for storing individual user information.     

The new Profile provider enables developers to customize the storage of RSSBus profile information.  This allows developers to build custom providers that define how and where user information is stored.  This enhancement enables the RSSBus Feed Server to work seamlessly in a hosted environment where individual users maintain their own profile information.  This release includes a pre-built Windows Registry Provider Manager, as well as a new ASP.NET Profile Manger that interfaces with ASP.NET Membership Services

In addition, RSBScript now includes the new <rsb:pipe> construct that  simplifies the syntax for pipelining feeds together between operations.  Instead of nesting operation calls within each other the rsb:pipe syntax provides easy to use Unix-style linear execution.

<rsb:pipe>
  <rsb:call op='ListUnpaidInvoicesInQuickBooks.rsb' />
  <rsb:call op='EmailCustomerNoticeOfCollections.rsb' />
  <rsb:call op='EmailAccountsReceivableCollectionsReport.rsb' />
</rsb:pipe>

Please download the latest public Beta and let us know what you think.  If you are going to be at ETech next week, make sure to stop by our booth and pick-up your very own RSSBus.

Download the latest Beta (Beta 4c) of RSSBus Desktop Edition or RSSBus Feed Server online.

NewsGator Technologies has announced plans to license RSSBus as part of NewsGator Enterprise Server.  Under terms of the agreement, NewsGator plans to distribute a co-branded version of RSSBus Feed Server.  We are excited to be working with NewsGator to enable RSS connectivity for their customers applications throughout their entire enterprise customer base. 

"This agreement is another important step in the evolution of Enterprise RSS as an integral component of next-generation communications and collaboration initiatives," said Dave Keller, general manager of Enterprise Solutions at NewsGator Technologies. "The combination of NewsGator Enterprise Server and the RSSBus Feed Server makes it easy for companies to combine modern enterprise 2.0 tools with traditional business applications to improve business efficiency and facilitate better information distribution."

For more information, read the full press release or the NewsGator blog post.

Over the past year we have been talking a lot about connecting data from sources, in a fashion that resembles the "pipe and filter" mechanism. It turns out that we share a common vision with Yahoo when it comes to using RSS as the core technology for messaging and data transformation. Yahoo recently announced Yahoo Pipes which provides an online graphical interface allowing you to "mashup" RSS feeds in much the same way as RSSBus. 

In his blog yesterday, Tim O’Reilly highlights some of the technical features of Yahoo Pipes:

"Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters..., count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops."

Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, take a look at the RSSBus Whitepaper. The ability to manipulate and transform data feeds is at the very essence of the RSSBus.

The first step however is feeding data to the pipe. We are encouraged by constantly emerging data sources on the Internet, Yahoo RSS Feeds, Google's API's among others, good as they are, a lot of important data is entangled in applications and IT infrastructure that are internal and proprietary. This is where RSSBus truly shines. RSSBus has a connector architecture that enables you produce feeds from a growing list of software applications or online services (browse through our growing list of connectors).

Want to subscribe to new opportunities on Salesforce.com? Use the Salesforce ops and configure the feed. What about feeds of reports from your Oracle or SQL database? Again, with RSSBus you can configure a feed of database reports in minutes. Since RSSBus is a software application and not a 3rd party service, you can be sure that the sensitive feeds that you produce are safe and secure. Moreover, easy and simple interfaces, allow you to write connectors to tap into data sources that are unique to you.

We are excited about the release of Yahoo Pipes and feel it is a terrific step forward.  Watch for demos in the near future that show how to use Yahoo Pipes to easily create and expose feeds of essential business data.

For all of the RSSBus users that have been asking for a hosted version of RSSBus to build feeds with, we're listening... keep an eye out for more announcements soon!

RSSTools is a set of development components that accompanies the RSSBus Engine.  It includes a full array of client access components for all major platforms and development environments.  These components are useful for use within applications other than the RSSBus framework.    

In addition to client components, the RSSTools package provides a set of embedded servers that allow you to serve RSS content from any application.

The server components are embedded web servers that run within the context of your application or device and translate RSSBus operation calls to events within your application.  You intercept these calls and provide output to the component as a set of RSS items.  The component then serializes these items into an RSS feed which gets served to the client.

The current release of RSSTools includes the following components:

• RSSClient - Used to retrieve RSS feeds with data extensions. Supports secure (SSL) communication and HTTP auhentication.
• RSSFeed - RSS feed creation and manipulation component.
• RSSServer - Specialized embeddable web server component that can serve RSS feeds from any application.

Download the RSSTools Beta for your development environment of choice here.

Build 2582: one step closer to release, a host of new capabilities.  We have tinkered a bit with the product names, to better reflect what they do.  The new names are RSSBus Feed Server for the old Server Edition, and RSSBus Desktop for the old Desktop Edition.    

The Admin Console has changed accordingly, to better reflect the product focus on Dynamic RSS Feed generation. In other changes we would highlight:

• Support for Microsoft Excel Web Queries: RSSBus Feeds can now be called directly from Excel (using the Web Query feature), and be automatically refreshed based on settings on the spreadsheet.
  Just click the "Excel" button in the RSBScript editor and you will see it in action.  We will post a screencast on this soon.
• We had introduced plugin support for scripting in languages other than RSBScript in the previous release.
  In Beta 4 we have added support for scripting with Python.  Please refer to the python.rsb script in the demos folder. It demonstrates the usage Python language plugin included in PythonOps.
  Support for other languages is in the pipeline, and of course, the interface is open, so you can always add your own.
• New connectors: too many to mention, and more will be added every day.  Check the new directory.

The new Online Directory is the most exciting bit of news for us.  You can now browse and search for connectors, scripts/feeds, and templates.  If you see something you like, download it and try it out!  You can create your own account and share your own work: connectors, feeds, and more!

We have spent the past couple of months hardening the RSSBus Engine and preparing it for production. You will notice significant performance improvements, better error handling, better integration with ASP.NET, and a better security infrastructure.     

Since RSSBus makes it easy to access and publish business data via RSS, we knew that security and access control would be a major concern. As a result we tightly coupled the RSSBus security infrastructure with that of ASP.NET, providing a robust, easily manageable and secure interface that many people are already familiar with and using in their organizations today.

We have also improved the accessibility of RSS within RSSBus Scripts and Templates. RSBScript now includes a plug-in architecture that allows support for scripting in other languages. Adding support for a new language is as simple as writing an operation that connects to the language interpreter. Keep and eye out for Iron Python and other scripting language support in the coming weeks!

Incidentally, the above should provide yet another answer to the "Why a new language?" question. RSBScript is not a new language: it's a mini-language, a domain-specific scripting tool for configuring and managing RSSBus feeds. With the new language plug-in mechanism you are free to use the RSSBus XML constructs or any other scripting language.

Among other features:

• multiple "sub-scripts" can now be included within the same script file and invoked as script#sub-script;
• support for HTTP method binding, simplifying the process of creating REST services;
• automatic support for Simple List Extensions (just look at RSSBus feeds under IE7);
• the new <rsb:cache> keyword enables caching of script/operation output, thereby providing a measure of load control on a busy server;
• feed formatters can now be invoked straight from the url line by simply adding @format=foo to the parameter list; ...and more!

We have also added a number of new operations and improved a number of the existing ones. If we mentioned all the changes, the list would be too long, so instead we invite you to download the beta and explore on your own.