I read the XML Daily Newslink, and saw the following reference:

AtomServer Helps Serve Up AtomPub
Taylor Cowan, O’Reilly Technical

The most interesting development within the XML world of late is AtomPub.
It abstracts the details (however simple they may be) of REST and
provides them in a well specified protocol. Instead of writing home
grown RESTfull web services, merely decompose your domain into
collections or listings of XML blocks and let AtomPub handle the details
of query, create, delete, and update. One attractive benefit is that you
can bank on a plethora of AtomPub client implementations…today.
Furthermore, many services (gdata – Google Data APIs) are sprouting up
so that the domain is familiar. Connecting to an RSS feed has always
been simple, now we can detach ourselves from the dark days of SOAP
over-engineering and provide data to the clients who want it with ease.
So clearly I like Atom…but something has been missing. Until recently
you’d be on your own in deciding how to implement the protocol. Many
things are left to the particular implementation such as the URL format.
The first thing to come along for Java developers was Abdera. This
makes it possible to quickly write your own AtomPub server, however,
it does require one to write more than a few lines of code. Having
played around with Rails I could imagine that it wouldn’t be too far
off until we had something that made creating and binding an Atom server
to a database simpler, and it’s finally here in AtomServer. In their
own words, “AtomServer is a generic data store implemented as a
REST-ful web service.” More specifically, it’s a generic data store
implemented as AtomPub. I downloaded the distribution and I was able
to get it running easily.

http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/atomserver-helps-serve-up-atom.html
See also Atom references: http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html

For those of you that don’t know, Atom is a standard for XML distribution of information. It started as an update to Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and, thanks in part to the use of RSS in the blogging community, took on a life of its own as a general information distribution medium.

One part of the Atom standard is AtomPub, a RESTful way to publish Atom feeds. The atomserver implements AtomPub, in Java, and along with a demo installation that’s easy to set up and use.

I’ll post more as I discover ways to use this.