Is http://feedly.com built using PHP, Java, or some other language/framework?
I have googled for some information on it, and saw that it uses JSON/REST extensively. But, I am not sure as to what feed parser is used to render images and videos into the application so elegantly, ie:
Is this about the feed parser, or the rendering? At any rate, the feed parser is google's, and likely derived from the eponymous python package. The rendering is client-side javascript. This is a very cost-efficient, stateless architecture.
After more research, I found out that feedly's CEO commented on their blog ( http://blog.feedly.com/2009/03/03/jsonrest-vs-xmlsoap/ ) and stated that:
Although JSON works indeed very well in Javascript application, it works equally well on the server side (our back-end is entirely implemented in Java using MySQL and Memcached through hibernate). JSON is just a very simple and efficient way of representing data structure. Based on my experience 5-10% of applications really need the complexity/composition complexity of XML+XML schema. Of the rest, I think that JSON gives you the same value with a lot less complexity and more efficiency.
I have a plan to create website similar to Feedly using RSSBus, I use feedly on a daily basis for my personal news, but would like a bit more control and do not like the fact that I need a browser plugin.