Network Computing Reports on Enterprise 2.0
Monday, June 25, 2007

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.

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POP to RSS
Friday, June 22, 2007

Recently we posted a script that created an RSS Feed from the messages in IMAP mailbox and got requests from people who would like to do the same with their POP server. RSSBus  comes with PopOps, that just fill the bill.

This script uses PopOps to retrieve all of the messages in the specified folder with the popList call. This script will return the sender and the subject of each message that is currently in the specified mailbox.

<rsb:info description="A feed of emails in a POP3 mailbox.">

  <input name="password" description="The POP password." />

  <input name="server" description="The POP server." />

  <input name="user" description="The POP username." />

</rsb:info>

 

<rsb:set attr="password" value="MY_PASSWORD" />

<rsb:set attr="server" value="MY_SERVER" />

<rsb:set attr="user" value="MY_USERNAME" />

 

<rsb:call op="popList">

<rsb:set attr="myout.rss:author" value="[pop:fromname]

  <[pop:fromemail]>" />

  <rsb:push item="myout" title="[pop:subject]">

    New email from [pop:fromname] <[pop:fromemail]><br />

    Subject: [pop:subject]

  </rsb:push>

</rsb:call>

Downloads: RSBScript | PopOps
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IMAP to RSS
Monday, June 18, 2007

My mobile phone does not support IMAP, but it does support RSS. With a simple scirpt in RSSBus Feed Server I can now read my emails striaght from my mobile phone.

This script uses ImapOps to retrieve all of the messages in the specified folder with the imapListMessages call. Within the imapListMessages call is another operation which is called imapGet. The imapGet operation retrieves an individual IMAP message, and this script will return the sender and the subject of each message that is currently in the specified mailbox.

<rsb:info description="A feed of emails in an IMAP mailbox.">

  <input name="mailbox" description="The IMAP mailbox." default="Inbox" />

  <input name="password" description="The IMAP password for authentication." />

  <input name="server" description="The IMAP server." />

  <input name="user" description="The IMAP username for authentication." />

  <input name="maxitems" description="Maximum number to retrieve." default="15" />

</rsb:info>

 

<rsb:set attr="password" value="MY_PASSWORD" />

<rsb:set attr="server" value="MY_SERVER" />

<rsb:set attr="user" value="MY_USERNAME" />

 

<rsb:call op="imapListMessages">

  <rsb:call op="imapGet?id=[imap:id]">

    <rsb:set attr="myout.rss:author" value="[imap:fromname]

      <[imap:fromemail]>" />

      <rsb:push item="myout" title="[imap:subject]">

        New email from [imap:fromname] <[imap:fromemail]><br />

        Subject: [imap:subject]

      </rsb:push>

    </rsb:call>

</rsb:call>

Downloads: RSBScript | ImapOps
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