Syndication is a website's capability to share its content with other sites (outbound syndication) and use the content of other sites on its own (inbound syndication). Both types of syndication are available with the Syndication Enhancement. The possiblities for sharing content across the internet are limited only by your imagination. With your dbcObjects™ site foundation, you can easily syndicate your dynamic content with other sites and publish syndicated content from other websites on your site.
Inbound Syndication - An example of inbound syndication is found in the News enhancement where news headlines are brought into the site from moreover.com. However, we do not have to limit our inbound syndication to simply headines. With the Syndication enhancement, your site can import full articles, stock quotes and charts, weather reports and charts, horoscopes, in fact anything, from any website on the internet. Of course copyright and proper use agreements must be created between your site and the content provider, and normally there is a fee charged by the content provider.
By way of example, we have implemented very simple demonstrations of inbound stock quotes and weather - see the search boxes in the right column. These are examples of the "pull" type of inbound syndication. Inbound-pull syndication is a very common way to bring fresh, dynamic content into your site on demand.
However, the Syndication enhancement also supports "push" syndication in which the content is pushed onto your site by the provider. This type of syndication usually involves java applets that are embedded into pages of your site. These applets maintain communication with the provider's computers and assume the responsibility of always presenting fresh content.
Outbound Syndication - Any dbcObjects™ content object may be enabled for outbound "pull" syndication. Then once you have authorized the other site to pull content from your site, they simply query the dbcObjects™ content objects you have authorized and the content will be released to the site in the popular XML format. (If you are new to XML click here for more information.) We can also create custom "push" applets for outbound syndication.
