Question

I am making an app for my college where we have to parse RSS feed and display it. I am using SAX Parser to parse it and its working smoothly. Now I want two functionality in my app. First of all I want to run it as a service so that it may notify users about new events i.e new updates from RSS and how should I differentiate between the old RSS feed parsed and the new one so that I can show only the new updates.

Please give a overview on how can I implement these two things.

Answer 1

I don’t know about the first question (how to make it a service) but I’ve done the second in a past life. The way I went about it was:

1. Compute the hash (sha1) from the title (you might want add other fields too)
2. Store the hash into a database along with time stamp
3. If the hash matches the entry in the database don’t add it
4. if (3) fails add to database
5. Display everything in the database in descending order of timestamp (latest first)