What is OneFeed

The Free Feed Aggregator

About

At its core, OneFeed is an abstraction to the mess that is social media feed APIs. Through this abstraction, it offers multi-platform feed aggregation and API request reduction via caching. The project accomplishes this with two key components:

1. OneFeed Core (API), which provides a unified interface for retrieving data from social media APIs; and
2. OneFeed Server, which uses that, Spring Boot, and a plugin architecture so devs can painlessly configure, serve, and consume their data.

OneFeed Core

Highlights

1. Unified interface for retrieving social media feed data with ease
2. Mandated support for default content and author implementations by providers to remove the need for DTO handling
3. Preservation of provider-specific DTOs to support mapping data to custom content and author schemas
4. Zero coupling to the OneFeed Server, so you're free to use the API however and wherever you please

Concept & Goals

The OneFeed Core API abstracts complex, platform-specific content and author retrieval APIs so you can focus on consuming the data, not retrieving it. These methods are simple, reactive, versatile, and intuitive. A quick call to fetchContent(amount, feeds, options, <cursor>) is the primary touchpoint. It outputs a Flux of content in the provider's platform's DTO and supports pagination however the platform handles it (or doesn't).

All Providers (implementations of a social media's content and author APIs in conformance to OneFeed Core API) are required to provide a Normalizer converting the DTOs they output into the default Content and Author implementations the OneFeed API provides.

If you don't want to use the default Content and Author implementations, you can take the DTOs as-is and/or map them to a normalized schema of your choice.

Although the OneFeed Server heavily relies on OneFeed Core to support its functionalities, OneFeed Core is completely independent. So long as your implementations conform to its API, they will work for anyone, anywhere, in any context.

OneFeed Server

Highlights

1. REST API exposing content from any of your configured feeds in a single shape with a single call
2. Hot-swappable plugin support to reduce downtime and promote implementation reuse
3. Content and author data caching to minimize social media API calls and save your wallet
4. Per-feed configurations in a single, centralized file with secret decoupling and siloing
5. Default content and author implementations out-of-the-box, supported by all plugins, with DTOs accessible for caching and serving custom normalizations

Concept & Goals

The OneFeed Server, a Spring Boot service, offers a REST API for your clients to fetch an aggregation of (theoretically) any social media feed's content and receive normalized, ready-to-display data in the shape of your choosing without the headache of juggling platform-specific DTOs and content retrieval procedures.

Developers can install plugins from others who've already published their implementations of social media APIs in accordance to the OneFeed Core API. These plugins can be loaded and unloaded at runtime.

Similarly, developers can install plugins providing caching services from their favorite database providers to significantly reduce platform API usage (and thus costs).

Providers are configurable on a per-feed basis in a single file. Environment variables are abstracted with inline references, keeping the service portable. All configurations are handled such that plugins only receive the data and secrets you designate to them.

Default schemas for Content and Authors are provided out-of-the-box by the API and supported by every Provider plugin, meaning you can spin up a functional server with zero code. If you prefer your Content or Authors in a different shape, you can simply fork the project and plumb the platform-specific DTOs into a transforming Normalizer of your choice.

Development

Timeline

Truthfully, as this is a hobbyist project, none at the moment. The goal, however, is a stable release by the end of this summer.

Current Status

This project is currently in early-mid development and thus unstable. At the moment, I'm focusing on the following core features:

• Hot-swappable content provider and cache (database) service plugins
  • Developing Instagram and Facebook Provider Plugins alongside the API and app in this repository
    • Helps validate provider plugin loading and unloading on the app side and the interface design of the OneFeed Core API
    • Provides a live source of data to pull from when testing aggregation endpoints in the app
  • Soon, a Firebase or MongoDB (TBD) "Cacher" (database-based cache) plugin
    • Helps validate cache plugin loading and unloading on the app side and the interface design of the OneFeed Core API
    • Provides a live cache to pull from when testing aggregation endpoints
• OneFeed Server aggregation endpoints
  • Developing basic aggregation endpoints to test the functionality of the system end to end
• Extensibility of Content and Author data types
  • Providing native support for custom Content and Author definitions (rather than just extending an existing schema)
• Painless client-side API implementation
  • Preconfigured aggregations to be referenced by ID with a single, clean OneFeed Server API hit
  • Choice between minimizing time till first content/author load via stream (reactor-based) endpoints or super speedy implementation with complete response generate

Use

Running the App

It runs, but of course is not stable or final in any way. Lots of changes are still in the pipeline and lots of core functionality is still pending completion. Give it some time 😅.

Forking the Project

Probably not a great time to yet!