📰 RSS Feed Aggregator — Spring Boot REST API

A Spring Boot REST service that fetches, parses, and serves RSS/Atom feeds using Rome. It exposes simple endpoints like:

GET /api/{source}/{channel}

Example: GET /api/nytimes/homepage — returns parsed items from the NYTimes homepage feed as JSON.

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✨ Features

• 🔗 Fetches and parses remote RSS/Atom feeds into JSON
• 🛠 Exposes simple REST endpoints (/api/{source}/{channel})
• 🧩 Configurable sources directly in the controller
• ⚠️ Basic error handling for feed not found, parsing errors, and upstream issues
• ✏️ Uses Lombok to reduce boilerplate code

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Java 17+ ☕
• Maven 3.6+ 📦
• IDE with Lombok plugin installed ✨

Dependencies (pom.xml)

Rome (com.rometools:rome:1.18.0) 🔗 — for parsing RSS/Atom feeds

Lombok (org.projectlombok:lombok:1.18.30) ✏️ — to reduce boilerplate code

Spring Boot Test (org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test) 🧪 — for unit and integration testing

Build and Run

mvn clean package -DskipTests
java -jar target/rss-aggregator-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

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🌐 API

GET /api/{source}/{channel}

• Returns parsed feed items for the specified source and channel.
• Example: GET /api/nytimes/homepage
• Feed URLs are defined directly in the @GetMapping methods in the controller.

Optional query parameters:

• limit — number of items to return (?limit=10)
• since — ISO date to filter items published after (?since=2025-01-01T00:00:00Z)

Responses:

• ✅ 200 OK — JSON array of feed items
• ⚠️ 404 Not Found — source/channel not configured
• 🚨 502 Bad Gateway — upstream feed unreachable or invalid
• ❌ 500 Internal Server Error — unexpected error

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📄 Example Response

[
  {
    "title": "Example article title",
    "link": "https://example.com/article",
    "description": "Short summary or HTML description",
    "publishedDate": "2025-08-14T09:15:00Z",
    "author": "Author Name",
    "categories": ["World", "Politics"],
    "source": "nytimes",
    "channel": "homepage"
  }
]

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🛠 Development Notes

• Use SyndFeedInput from Rome to parse feeds
• Map SyndEntry to a DTO (FeedItemDto) using Lombok
• Consider caching feeds to reduce repeated HTTP calls
• Handle IOException and FeedException gracefully

Example DTO

@Data
@AllArgsConstructor
@NoArgsConstructor
public class FeedItemDto {
    private String title;
    private String link;
    private String description;
    private Instant publishedDate;
    private String author;
    private List<String> categories;
    private String source;
    private String channel;
}

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🧪 Testing

mvn test

• Use spring-boot-starter-test with mocks for HTTP responses

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💻 Example Usage

curl -s "http://localhost:8080/api/nytimes/homepage" | jq

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🌟 Suggestions & Improvements

• 🗄 Add caching with TTL to reduce upstream requests
• 🔒 Add authentication for private feeds
• ⏰ Implement scheduled background feed refresh
• 📜 Add filtering and pagination

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