HotSheet 0.5 Alpha

[JohnMunsch@zwave.com]

I've posted the source for my Java application HotSheet. HotSheet 
parses RSS 0.90, 0.91 and the competing 1.0 standard and presents the 
news items in a list which can be clicked on to open a browser.

The idea is similar to that of Novobot or Headline Viewer except:

 - It's Java so it should work on any of Mac OS X, Solaris, Windows, 
or Linux. And if it doesn't, it will be fixed :)
 - The RSS library is a set of separate classes that make up the 
model portion of the application. This portion is completely 
separable and designed to be embedded within other apps that need to 
parse and work with RSS channels and items. Two different 
demonstration applications show usage of the RSS library outside of 
HotSheet.
 - It's open source (BSD style license). You can build on HotSheet, 
create a new competing application, or use the RSS library to build 
something completely different. That includes commercial applications.

One of the two sample applications is somewhat relevant to a recent 
discussion about end user tools for RSS. It pulls an RSS channel and 
reformats it into a JavaScript file. That file can be uploaded to a 
server via FTP and then another page can reference it (like 
iSyndicate used to do). If it was turned into an automated tool that 
worked on a timer end users could use it to update news on Blogger or 
other weblogging tool generated pages without having to have a 
dynamic server setup like JSP, ASP, or PHP.

The homepage for everything is:

http://www.johnmunsch.com/projects/HotSheet

There is a link at the bottom that will take you to the SourceForge 
project page with all the source and a long list of features that I 
intend to add or hope others will add over time.

Even if you aren't interested in development, install and run it and 
let me know how it works for you. I'm especially interested in how it 
works for users on operating systems other than Windows because 
testing those is not practical for me.

If you have features you'd like to see added, want to tell me about 
bugs, or have support questions just go to the SourceForge page and 
there are facilities for all of that.

John Munsch