[gpodder-devel] gPodder like podcatcher I'm working on for Android
- From: thp at gpodder.org (Thomas Perl)
- Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 22:00:28 +0100
Hi Leif and all,
On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 08:25:17AM -0700, Leif Andersen wrote:
> > On a related note, which might be interesting to both projects: I've
> > been working on mygpo-feedservice [1] which is a webservice for
> > parsing podcast feeds and delivering the contents as JSON. This could
> > offload a bit of the parsing-work from the clients to the service and
> > hence speed up the applications. Feel free to contact me if you are
> > interested in using it.
>
> True, but if we need code that does similar things, I would be happy to
> work with the other person to get both of them out faster. Also, I'll
> take a look at your parser, it seems interesting. I'm not sure how long
> it takes to parse XML on a device like that (I'm using the built in
> Document object, combined with NodeList and Element, I based the idea
> off of a friends piece of code (which was also released under the Apache
> v2 licence)), but so far it seems like downloading the feed is the
> bottleneck. Either way, it does look interesting, and I'll preform some
> tests to compare speed.
Judging from my experience with gPodder on Maemo devices (which was one
of the initial motivations for creating the feedservice), offloading the
parsing and downloading of feeds to a web service is a good idea for
several reasons:
* The server-side could implement intelligent caching and only supply
differences (not implemented, but a possibility)
* Buggy/ugly feeds can be fixed on the server side
* The server filters the feeds and returns wonderful, pre-parsed JSON
that can be taken by the client as a single entity
* One single request to the server can download all podcasts, whereas
with client-side parsing you have to contact every web server
I'll be using the feedservice for a future project, and maybe I'll also
add support for it to gPodder - at least for mobile versions. Of course,
using the feedservice has the disadvantage of relying on the service to
be available, but that's about the only disadvantage of it ;)
HTH.
Thomas
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