Feed Reader updates (Eg Google Reader or Bloglines)

Question

Hi there

What is the method through which online feed reader sites like google reader updates its feed is it cron or something else.

Sorry if question is too basic i am still a novice in programming.

Answer 1

cron or something else

That's actually right to the point. The basic idea is that you need to run non-user-triggered scheduled work in the application to update the feeds, and how this is done depends very much on the server environment and the web framework. In a LAMP application it might be cron, in ASP.NET it might be a Windows Service or a Scheduled Task. Some web frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, have specialized modules for this.

Your only real obstacle will be finding a way to run code that is not the result of a user requesting a resource from your server.