Be the First to Know. Really.

So, you have an early-2000 style repository, like Maven Central:

And let’s say you are very, extremely interested to know when the new version of netty comes out.  We understand, it’s a natural addiction. How can you do it? Here are some ideas:

• Well, you can visit Maven Central every day. Couple of times a day.
• Oh, they have an RSS feed (did we mention early-2000?) It will notify you for everything being published to Maven Central. Well, probably you’ll spend all day reading those notifications, but eventually your eye might catch the project update you are looking for. You could also use Google Reader to filter the RSS stream for you… Oh, wait…
• Another idea! You can use their REST API. Just a simple query directly on their Solr will produce you a nice JSON file of 109 lines, and by a trivial parsing you’ll find the latest version…