Real World Web Services

Chapter 11. Project 8: Automatic Daily Discussions

Let’s say that you decide to set up a weblog covering the latest news on Java and XML programming. You’d like to keep it fresh, ideally posting new content every day to spur conversations. Finally, you want new content to be posted automatically—even if you’re away. We know that Google is constantly indexing the Web, culling out undesirables, and doing everything it can to deliver useful results for specific searches. Why not leverage that search capability to find out interesting topics for conversation in a community?

In this chapter, you’ll build an application to combine your Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/) or LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/) weblog with Google’s search functionality.

Weblogs

A weblog is a web site with a set of stories, sorted chronologically. Generally speaking, the idea is that it should be extremely easy to post a new story to a weblog, allowing for very natural, seamless writing. Personal weblogs often resemble diaries or journals. Group or corporate weblogs typically serve to allow a group of people with common interests to share thoughts, news, or discuss problems.

The precise definition of a weblog varies. Similarly, there’s a huge variety in the software used to run and manage a weblog. Some, like LiveJournal and Blogger, are hosted on a central server. Others are desktop software, and still others are installed on individual personal web servers. There are distinct advantages and disadvantages ...