Bloglines vs. JAggregator 1:0
Almost three years ago I started the development of JAggregator. I was just discovering the world of Blogs and RSS and needed a decent cross-platform aggregator. The ones available, Risotto and HotSheet, I found lacking.
At the time I was quite bored with my day job. I thought, I needed a change, needed to keep current with what was happening in the Java world, needed to widen my area of expertise.
I decided to write my own news aggregator. Until then, I've exclusively programmed client-side desktop applications. My idea was to do something web-based and reuse and learn as much as possible. As a result I made JAggregator a desktop application based on web technologies and almost every library available from Jakarta: commons-digester, commons-lang, commons-collections, ECS, NekoHTML, Quartz and Velocity.
I made quick progress; developed a RSS library, built JAggregator on top of it and gave it a certain anarcho chic. It was the application, I used most.
Unfortunately, I missed my window of opportunity. Development of a lot of the news aggregators that are in use today --Aggie, NewsMonster, RSS Bandit and SharpReader -- started at that time. While I registered a domain and a SourceForge project I never used them. I always wanted to develop a nice, stable and well-designed application first and release then. I never did.
Since then, times have changed. Because of internal changes, I'm no longer bored with what I have to do at work. I have two little daughters, play in a table tennis team, maintain a couple of web sites for friends and relatives and recovered from a hard-disk crash.
It is really sad, but I don't have the time for further development. Since the hard-disk crash, I've been reading blogs with Bloglines and stuck with it. Basically, it has everything I wanted to achieve with JAggregator and more.
So here's my offer: I release the source code on my software page. If somebody is interested, I'll transfer both the SourceForge project and the JAggregator.org domain to him. Otherwise I'll close them at the end of this year.
If your interested, leave a comment or send me an email.