Available under the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) License, Gosling - or "JAG" as he is inevitably known, from his initials - the Juicy News Network feed reader is an open source project at Sun's java.net site via JLNP.

Gosling himself describes the application as "pretty straightforward." 

"The most interesting thing," he says, "is what it does to be fast at startup: all news feed reading is done by a swarm of low priority threads, one for each feed. So all feeds get fetched in parallel. This is very easy to do in Java: the threading API and networking support made it all straightforward."

"It comes with a preset list of subscriptions," continues Gosling. "You can unsubscribe to news feeds by using the 'unsubscribe' menu entry. You can subscribe to feeds by using drag-and-drop of RSS URLs or HTML pages with rss+xml links. There's a 'Help' page that explains it all."

"All the sources are there," Gosling adds, "as well as a JAR file that works on any platform, and a Mac OS X installation."

Gosling doesn't mention Tim Bray, who has just joined Sun to work on - among other things - developing new applications for blogs and the RSS  technology that has grown out of them. ("I think that this is potentially a game-changer in some respects, and there are quite a few folks at Sun who share that opinion," Bray said this week.) 

Neither does he make any comment as to whether JNN is likely to be used by folks at Sun to monitor the growing horde of Microsoft bloggers!