Erl-metafeed: Web feeds mashup engine and GUI widget toolkit

In this paper, we present Erl-metafeed, a mashup engine for web feeds and its application as widget toolkit backend system for real-time remixing of web feeds. The emerging real-time web is based on web feeds-streams of real-time information usually implemented using RSS/Atom protocols. Since real-time content is torrential, web users who follow a large number of web feeds usually overwhelm their feed-readers with content they are not able to handle in a reasonable time. The goal of the Erl-metafeed is to provide a platform for scalable management of web feeds in near real-time. The prototype is implemented in Erlang programming language because of its concurrency support and soft real-time execution. Erl-metafeed is programmable using custom query language available via web interface. Additionally, since textual query language is not suitable for end-users, we designed and implemented set of web widgets on top of the Geppeto programming environment. Geppeto environment enables intuitive composition of widgets into powerful mashups, thus circumventing need for learning query language.