Chapter 12. Building an RSS reader app with Ionic
This chapter covers
- Designing a simple RSS reader application
- Using Ionic for Cordova development
- Enhancing the application with native plugins
For the final chapter, you’re going to build a real, if simple, application—an RSS reader.
RSS is an XML format commonly used by blogs as a way to syndicate their content. While not as popular as it once was, a website using RSS can share its content with other websites and tools. An example of a website using RSS to syndicate content is CNN. If you open your browser to www.cnn.com/services/rss/, you’ll see a complete list of RSS feeds covering different parts of their content (figure 12.1).
Each RSS link goes to an XML file. Different browsers render RSS feeds a bit differently, but many will display an RSS feed pretty nicely (figure 12.2).
Think of RSS as a “content-pure” version of a website. Looking at the CNN “Top Stories” RSS feed in figure 12.2, what you’re getting is just the articles. No sidebars and no headers and footers with navigation, but the pure content from CNN.
Because RSS is a known format, many tools exist to parse and render RSS content. Your application will use an RSS feed to drive the content of a hybrid mobile application. Let’s look at a simple mockup of the final product. The first screen, shown in figure 12.3, is a list of articles from the RSS feed.