Websites/Mozilla.org/Archive/Design Implementation/RSS

What we want to do

We want a feed parser that

• pulls latest feed info from feeds.mozilla.com for front page
• pulls latest feed info from news.rdf (for now) for front page
• optionally: creates mash ups of multiple feeds on sub-pages (e.g. Our causes > Education)

How to do it

Mozilla.org has a lot of visitors, so we probably want to cache feed items for some time to a) be nice to the feed provider and b) get better performance.

We probably want a database-based cache over a file-based cache, because it gives faster results.

TTL of the cached items can be relatively high (higher on the sub-pages than on the front page), because we offer the feeds to open up an additional window into the community and not to be a direct, always-up-to-date information resource.

Implementation

There are several different options (subject to evaluation):

Write a parser from scratch

• + maybe better performance
• + would hopefully be exactly what we want
• - more development time
• - not as well tested as other solutions

Zend Framework

• New BSD license
• very modular and flexible
• PHP5 only (read: makes use of new OOP features, which is good)
• well maintained, active development
• DB abstraction layer, cache handling
• some known issues, API a bit counter-intuitive in places
• probably not as heavily tested as other solutions (because relatively new)

PEAR

• XML_Feed_Parser
  • LGPL license
  • No maintainer
• XML_RSS
  • PHP license
  • No active development (last version from 06)

SimplePie

• BSD license
• Caching out of the box (flat file only right now, but could be overloaded with own DB-class)
• Meshing of multiple feeds out of the box
• Problems with some feeds, but workarounds exist
• Nice API