Playing with the RSS and Atom Ruby libraries at Lunar Ocean

I have been checking out the various libraries available out there in Ruby.

My first goal is to be able to parse both RSS and Atom feeds.

In chronogical order, here are my finds:

Feed Normalizer

Feed Normalizer does a pretty good job at parsing both RSS and Atom feeds.

Feed Normalizer uses a list of parsers with priority to parse the feeds. It appears the best parser is simple-rss, none other supporting Atom.
So basically using Feed Normalizer is facading simple-rss nicely.

simple-rss

Simple-rss is a GPL library that parses RSS and Atom feeds. That’s cool, but simple-rss missed the issued attribute on the Atom feeds, so there is no way to get the publication date.

I opened a bug regarding this issue.

Atom

Atom sounded like a good library, but from what I saw there was no RSS support.

FeedTools

FeedTools is apparently the most accomplished library I have seen.

Apparently its caching mechanism is good, but not perfect and generating a feed with it is taking more and more time.

Conclusion
All the libraries I have been looking into don’t have much documentation, and are more or less maintained.

I am still looking at the solutions available:
- Create some new parsers on feed-normalizer to handle Atom nicely.
- Create my very own parser to parse any feed out there. I prefer this function because I could handle the feeds as Atom by default, instead of losing their information with RSS.