Hi @ALL,

we decided to mark all ROME Fetcher classes as deprecated in version 1.6 and to drop it completely in version 2.0. ROME Fetcher was useful some years ago when internet connections were slow and expensive, because it supports ETags, GZip compression, RFC3229 delta encoding and caching.

Nowadays there are libraries like the well known Apache HttpClient. It supports ETags and GZip compression out-of-the-box, delta encoding seems to be used very rarely and there are also much better caching solutions (like EhCache) compared to our simple file and in-memory based implementations.

In addition, ROME fetcher is not flexible enough for many use-cases because the user has no full control over the underlying HTTP connection and sometimes even new ROME functionalities cannot be used without updating ROME Fetcher too.

Last but not least, the most comprehensive ROME Fetcher implementation (HttpClientFeedFetcher) uses Apache HttpClient in version 3 that has some security vulnerabilities. We are not able to update it to version 4 without breaking backwards compatiblity and simply removing the implementation in version 1.6 was not an option for us.

We hope you support our decision. It will help us to become faster and to concentrate on the core features.

Please give us some feedback, especially when you don't support our decision!

Regards,
Patrick