Thursday, June 8, 2006

Kicking Off The Abdera Project

So over the past few days things have started to get going on the Abdera project.

For those who haven't heard of it, Abdera is a project undergoing incubation at the ASF with the goal of implementing the Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol. It's starting off with a Java implementation of an Atom parser contributed by James Snell from IBM, and hopefully it will eventually expand to include client and server sides of the publishing protocol in Java, plus parser, client, and server implementations in other languages.

The mailing lists for Abdera were just set up a few days ago, and as soon as some paperwork makes its way through the system the initial code drop will be committed to the Subversion repository. It's a neat project, and I'm glad to be helping out with its incubation. Hopefully it'll even give me a chance to write a little bit of Java code, something I haven't done regularly in quite some time.

Oh, and for the curious, Abdera's name comes from the Greek city, which was the home of Democritus, the philosopher who created the theory of Atomism.