palacsint weblapja

In the past few years a growing number of websites have introduced RSS or Atom feeds to their readers to keep them up to date with news or updates. A wide selection of services and applications are available for the users to help them read these feeds.

However, many sites remain without such a notification service. This fact is not expected to change any time soon.

In this paper I introduce a Java EE solution to monitor changes of web pages which have not implemented RSS or Atom yet. This solution also supports the monitoring of other Internet sources such as FTP. After describing and discussing the architecture I will explore ideas for optimizing the solution, approaches on change detection and related HTTP functions. Considerations are also proposed on how to detect changes of static, dynamic and protected content.

The first part of the thesis contains an overview of the problem and its possible solutions. In the second part, a description of a Java EE implementation of the chosen solution will be presented together with a brief introduction of the involved third party components and the methods of automated testing that were used. In the last part ideas for further development are discussed. Finally, the results and experiences are summarized.