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Zero to Done...

I just got home from an overnight hackfest at my groupmate's place. We were faced with a pretty simple problem nobody wanted to solve: How to parse and extract content from an ATOM feed and create a data structure containing articles/entries to be rendered by either a GUI frontend, or some webservice others might want to build. *hint* *hint*

So there we were, 11 pm in the evening still sifting through the documents we could use for the crafting of an ATOM parser. Of course my conscience couldn't take just getting a ready made parser from the web and puttin it into our project. That wouldn't be very nice of me would it... Even if it was open source or something, it doesn't show what I can really do with my knowledge and abilities. And besides, my groupmates counted on me to get something working... Even I was counting on me to get something working, so I had to get at it with all my programming powers in high gear.

So after a couple of bags of chips, dimsums, matabang na pansit canton, and lots of water, we got from 0% complete to 70% complete. I did it. A functional atom feed parser, which I came up with by myself with the aid of the Java API, the internet, and very very patient groupmates. A LOT of brainstorming had to go on... And a lot of forehead slapping because of too many containers, variables, iterators, and method calls.

In 4 hours, a functional ATOM parser came out of me. The only thing left to do is integrate it with the GUI my other groupmate has already come up with, and an RSS parser which another groupmate is going to base on my ATOM parser.

And I thought XML parsing would be a headache... Thank God for JAXP. :D

Chill...

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