Now that OPML 2.0 is out as a draft specification, I want to bring up the issue of the lack of support for OPML on the Java side. There are 2 libraries dealing with the idea of creation and consuming of syndication feeds: Informa and ROME.

Informa is an open-source (LPGL) Java framework for parsing, processing, and creating syndication feeds. The current release supports RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0 / RDF, RSS 2.0, and Atom 0.3. Informa also support for OPML documents but it hasn’t seen any development since early June 2004. The news section of the Informa site claims that there is active development but I haven’t seen anything from them yet. I have used Informa in the past and it works great but hasn’t kept up with changing specifications.

The other open-source (Apache) Java library ROME, created by 3 Sun engineers is also a Java library for creating and parsing RSS and ATOM feeds. Today it accepts all flavors of RSS (0.90, RSS 0.91 Netscape, RSS 0.91 Userland, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0,) and Atom 0.3 and 1.0 feeds. Unlike Informa, ROME has active development going on and the team is putting releases quite frequently. But the major item missing is OPML support – ROME does not support OPML at this time and have no timelines documented on their roadmap.

Jakarta FeedParser is another project that I should probably mention but it’s currently dormant in the Jakarta commons sandbox.

Is anyone looking at implementing OPML support for Java? Anyone know of another open-source effort going on to support OPML creation and consumption? Is Informa ever going to come out of hibernation? Anyone interested in starting a new project to implement a Java library for OPML?