Node Superfeedr

It’s long overdue, but we built a little node.js library to interact with Superfeedr from any node.js application. I want to thank Martin Borho for his precious help, as well as Astro for his amazing work on node-xmpp

A bit of theory

We built this wrapper using our XMPP API.

This may sound surprising to a lot of you, as I have advised to a lot of people to use PubSubHubbub when they were building a web app.

The main reason behind this is that Node.js is the perfect framework to integrate an XMPP client, transparently. For most people the syntax behind any node application is a bit odd with all these callbacks. It simply comes from the fact that Node.js is an implementation of the very famous reactor pattern. This means that node.js can handle stateful protocols (like XMPP) very well… Most of web framework do not offer this, because they map HTTP’s stateless’s approach.

Installing

NPM is now a first class citizen in node… which means you can install superfeedr-node with a simple:

npm install -g superfeedr

Usage

In your node application, just instantiate a new Superfeedr Client, connect it, subscribe to feeds you need, and handle incoming notifications. It should all be relatively self-explanatory.

var Superfeedr = require('superfeedr').Superfeedr;
client = new Superfeedr("login", "password");
client.on('connected', function() {
  client.subscribe("http://blog.superfeedr.com/atom.xml", function(err, feed) {
    // console.log(feed);
    // { url: 'http://blog.superfeedr.com/atom.xml',
    //   title: 'Superfeedr Blog : Real-time cloudy thoughts from a super-hero',
    //   httpCode: 200,
    //   httpStatus: '37345B in 0.602513587s, 0/10 new entries',
    //   period: 43200,
    //   nextFetch: 1323523524000,
    //   lastFetch: 1323479726000,
    //   lastParse: 1323479726000,
    //   lastMaintenance: 1323401451000 }
  });
  client.on('notification', function(notification) {
    // console.log(notification);
    // { feed: 
    //    { url: 'http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed',
    //      title: 'Publisher example',
    //      httpCode: 200,
    //      httpStatus: '4775B in 0.170247116s, 1/20 new entries',
    //      period: 43200,
    //      nextFetch: 1323527327000,
    //      lastFetch: 1323482789000,
    //      lastParse: 1323482791000,
    //      lastMaintenance: 1323436703000 },
    //   entries: 
    //    [ { id: 'http://push-pub.appspot.com/feed/93006',
    //        postedTime: 1323482787,
    //        updated: 1323482787,
    //        title: 'Hello',
    //        summary: '',
    //        content: 'World',
    //        actor: [Object] } ] }
  });
});

FAQs!

• Will this work behind the firewall? Yes! As opposed to PubSubHubbub, the connection initiated by the client is kept alive (XMPP FTW!), so Superfeedr can just use this connection to send you the data :)

• Will this work on fully-managed platforms (Nodejitsu, Heroku…)? Yes! Of course… this should work very well!

• It sucks, can I make it better? Please do, fork it!