Publish and subscribe over the Internet

[Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>]

I sent Tim a private email that I should have sent to the list, it should be
on the record.

Imho, there are several components that are needed.

1. A registration point where anyone can declare "I want to subscribe to
this resource," identified by a URL.

2. The owner of the URL can query the registration point to find out who's
subscribed.

3. When the resource changes a message is sent to each subscriber, telling
it to invalidate its cache. The subscriber reloads the resource on the next
access and caches the result.

Further refinements:

1. Registrations expire after 24 hours. This helps assure all participants
that you're alive and well.

2. The whole thing can be done with any of the following: SOAP, XML-RPC or
HTTP-POST.

3. Subscribers should reload after some arbitrary amount of time even if
they haven't received notification from the registration point.

4. RSS makes good glue.

5. A lot of the functionality can be encapsulated in an FTP server or other
app that processes incoming stuff.

I've been working on servers and affiliates like this for 2+ years, and
keeping the various machines working has been a rich learning experience.
We're developing a new, much more broadly distributed and easy to use
network around these ideas, and have gone to the trouble of writing specs
and use-cases. Please, before reinventing what we already have working,
consider using it.

http://www.thetwowayweb.com/payloadsForRss

http://www.thetwowayweb.com/soapMeetsRss

Thank you..

Dave


______________________________
Dave Winer, UserLand Software
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"It's even worse than it appears."