The 0.3 release of the Rome Syndication Library marks the first release of the
Rome Fetcher.

This library provides a simple but useful implementation of a HTTP fetcher for RSS/Atom feeds. It supports
HTTP conditional gets (ie: last modified and ETag handling),
and enables users to follow the Atom aggregator behaviour recommendations.

As has been
noted
over the
last couple
of days syndication clients often ignore the finer points of feed retrieval. The Rome
Fetcher is designed to do the right thing in the simplest way possible.

It comes with a decent set of test cases (using an embedded Jetty instance) – although they are currently disabled as they crash Maven (I believe this is a Maven bug).

The other big selling point is that in introduces no new libraries above the requirements used by Rome (ie, JDom beta 10).

As Pat
mentioned, I've done a http fetching library for Rome. It is now
checked in and available.

It supports HTTP conditional gets
(ie: last modified and ETag handling) and GZip encoded feeds.
It should enable user to write aggregators that follow the
Atom aggregator behaviour recommendations.

Some docs are available (although
this will probably move).

If you are interested, please give it a go and report issues on the Wiki or on the Rome dev mailing list.