The goal of the Informa Project is to provide a news aggregation library based on the Java Platform. The idea was born by the authors of two Java news reader applications (HotSheet and Risotto). We intended to unify the common parts into a library which can be used by any developer who needs to address those issues in their application.

With Informa we enable you with a harmonised view on a news channel object model. Both channels and news items do have metadata assigned, it does not make any difference from which channel format they were originally retrieved (RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0 / RDF, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0).

To ease finding relevant news items an integration with the full-text search engine (Jakarta's Lucene) may be used optionally.

Besides exporting news channels in a specified XML format there is a persistence backend available using the Hibernate O/R mapping framework. This allows to persist the whole object model into a JDBC-compliant relational database. As default database HypersonicSQL was chosen, because it is very easy to embed. Alternatively you may want to give the other persistent backend based on Castor JDO storage mechanism a try (from Informa release 0.7.0 not any longer supported).

Currently, Informa is in beta state, but it is quite stable and fully usable. You are very welcome to send in feature requests or bug reports (preferably through the sourceforge pages).

Informa is licensed under the GNU Library or "Lesser" Public License (LGPL).

Any questions? Contact Niko Schmuck.