TechNayak

[digg=http://digg.com/design/Can_you_use_RSS_in_enterprise_software]Yes you can. It takes a careful planning and judicous decisions to incorporate RSS in to your enterprise architecture. RSS is a revolutionary technology that makes it really simple to publish facts/figures and data to intended subscribers. I can forsee RSS being an important part in everyday enterprise applications. I shall take a few examples to show applications of RSS.

Example 1: Suppose you are a company that releases press statements once in a while. You dont need to ping all the news sites and other services about your latest news, you can have your own press statement RSS that people can subscribe to using their favorite Greader or newsgator. With specialised servicecs like feedburner, you can even track stats and other important info about people who read your feed.

Example 2: supposing your company exposes complex web services to give out updates on information. Take for example changes in share prices. Why send Kbs of information when all you need are the updates. Expose the updated values as an RSS. Let website publishers who wish to latch on to your content access updates from the RSS feed. Have issues with authentication, try Password protected RSS or even encrypted RSS.

Example 3: You are trying to make disparate systems work, say you have to relay inputs from a J2EE application on to a .NET application, but are getting confused with jargons like Message Queues and Web Services. In big terms Enterprise Application Integration. A carefully designed Publish Subscribe mechanism( inherent to RSS) can solve this problem and act as a data bridge. People spend Millions on EAI a simple standard solution like RSS can make it that simple.

In all these examples there is a security risk that has to be evaluated, but careful implementation of efficient algorithms can ensure only valid sources access the data.