RSS feeds are one of the most common ways of publishing data. Nearly every web site and CMS (content management system) now days publishes data as RSS. Since Carousel reads RSS feeds, this is a perfect way to integrate Carousel with other systems.

Many of our customers write custom scripts to generate RSS feeds from their data. These scripts can be written in almost anything; ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.. When Carousel runs the script by loading it via HTTP, it gets the data and returns it as RSS.

Most customers are able to write the script in-house. Since all databases are different, it’s hard to make an off the shelf query tool. That is why scripts are common.

If you can’t make a script, tools like RSSBus exist to make the process easier. RSSBus can query many different data sources including databases like SQL Server. I actually used RSSBus to create part of Tightrope’s digital dashboard.

It basically works the same with RSS bus, but RSSBus is the webserver and script.

I’ll make another blog post with an example of using RSSBus, but for now hopefully you understand how “in theory” you can connect other systems data into Carousel.