pubsub

This talk is worth a look. Forgive the title (which is a misnomer) and the way it frames REST; equating it to feeds designed to be consumed by polling clients - Newtonian physics to PubSub's quanta (poorly formed analogy). REST and RPC simply are suited to other types of services (I fail to see how RPC over XMPP is useful unless the time to process a request is long and callbacks are required). The talk goes on to use concrete examples that illustrate how hijacking Jabber servers and XMPP for generic push messaging using a pubsub architecture is far more efficient for lots of web services outside of IM that are currently pull-based. They even manage to fudge oAuth in for protected resources. It's the kind of pragmatism that smacks of real life problems solved (I salute).

I'd be very surprised if Last.fm's 'now playing' notifications didn't switch over to pubsub very soon.

tags: Development, Services, Software, Web