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Once the Newsfeed plugin is implemented, we need ways to identify and measure the benefits gained by using this plugin. In this section, we discuss the advantages of using the Newsfeed plugin as part of OCMP.

Convenience

The Newsfeed plugin makes the process of reading news on your mobile device much more convenient. Because the proxy handles the polling, it is able to poll news feeds as frequently as possible, without draining the battery life of the devices in the process. Because feed data is sent to the mobile device in the background, it will always be ready for the user to read, regardless of whether or not connectivity is present at the time that the reading occurs.

Bandwidth

Because the proxy does polling, the overhead of "useless" feed checks is avoided. Furthermore, there is usually little difference between two feeds that are close in time... the newer feed may have one or two articles, and then most of the old articles. As a results,

Battery Life

The savings above all translate into a savings in battery usage.

The real goal here is to extract useful lessons from the implementation of this plugin, independent of the base technology on which the plugin is based. Many of the details of implementation for RSS, Atom, etc, are not important. What is important is mode of operation for the news feeds. It is very simple: a provider continuously updates a file that remains in the same place. It is the burden of the reader to receive and parse the file to determine if there is any new data available.