I wanted to know how RSS/ATOM Feeds work. Do the feed readers connect regularly to websites to fetch data or do the websites send data to the feed reader. Also how can i include a feed reader in my website. How would it work on the server side any rough idea would be appreciated..
RSS is an XML format. Feed readers regularly connect to the address of the RSS feed and parse that XML file. I assume you are thinking about Google Reader, which uses AJAX to poll the RSS feed and see if there are any updates.
There are already many existing RSS frameworks for Java, including Rome.