Learning API Styles

Chapter 3. Atom

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 6th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

In this chapter, you will be introduced to the concepts of web feeds, with a particular focus on the Atom web feed syndication format. Web feeds serve a vital role as a channel for subscription-based information broadcasting. They are utilized in scenarios that require regular information updates such as news, blog posts, podcasts, or videos. We’ll start this chapter by discussing the evolution of web feeds and why they are important in the context of APIs. You’ll be provided with examples of web feeds, and once the theoretical base is built, you’ll implement an Atom web feed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of common security risks for web feeds and exposes a list of advantages and disadvantages. To solidify understanding of the subject, you’ll be given a set of exercises that requires subscribing to various web feeds.

ATOM, RSS, and Web Feeds

In this chapter, we’ll interchangeably refer to Atom or RSS ...