All Roads lead to Rome

From Tim Bray's blog, I learned about Rome: a library for parsing and generating RSS / ATOM documents. Not exactly earth shattering but it will be nice for server side work and if it's properly written (which it probably will be), it should mean better generated and handled feeds. Which is good. The article that refer's to Rome on Tim's site is about a topic close to my heart. Basically he differentiates between the respectable technologies that come into organizations through the front door (usually buzzword complaint stuff like J2EE, CORBA, SOA etc) by appealing to the CIO and "backdoor" technologies which are a hit with the techies and developers. Backdoor technologies (Scripting languages, RSS, Java, POJO etc) just sort of happen and no one ever figures out the ROI or it synergizes the strategic initiatives because they just make sense and they just work. I'm firmly in the latter camp (caveat: when it makes sense!) because often times people "know" what solution they need before they understand the problems they have and (more important) the problems they will have.