JERSS Project Documentation

Introduction to JERSS

JERSS stands for "Jay Eckles' Rich Site Summary". It is a project I embarked on when I discovered that syndicated news headlines were widely and freely available on the web from thousands of sources, but there were few tools available to integrate these headlines into a website. Previous tools were limited mostly to CGIs that required modifications to make the newsfeeds seamlessly match the design of your website. JERSS is different because 1. it's written in Java, and therefore will run on any platform and 2. instead of HTML, it generates Javascript that can be used by the web author to dynamically create custom HTML. It provides a greater ability to customize than any other RSS software. The only programming knowledge a web author needs to use the JERSS servlet is Javascript.

JERSS provides a free servlet called RSSViewerServlet. It is Java, therefore cross-platform compatible. The only system requirement is that you run a J2EE compliant application server like Apache's Jakarta-Tomcat, which is free. The JERSS servlet is distributed under the GNU Public License.

To give credit where credit is due, I want to point out that this software is based on the RSSApplet by Michael Classen at Webreference.com's XML channel.

If you have any questions or would like to contact me for any reason, please email me at j.eckles@computer.org.