Thursday, November 29, 2007

Atom over XMPP

I'm currently experimenting with the idea of using Atom over XMPP, at a minimum to push out a pointer to an entry behind a firewall into a more public staging area.

The thought would be that the Atom "pointer" to the entry is pushed into the public space, and when a client of that entry wants more detail, there is an XMPP service associated with the entry that can be used to retrieve the details.

Exactly half of me thinks that this is what Atom was meant to do - get the notion of an entry out there with enough information to make a decision about weather you want the detail, and let the interested parties decided if they want to fetch the remainder. The other half thinks that this is just the geek in me wanting to use Atom when there really isn't a need for it and that XMPP and less-structured XML stanzas can work just fine, that I can demand pull the list of entries when needed as well as the details.

There are some general rumblings out there on the interwebs, but no great success stories. Anyone care to share?

St. Peter seems to be thinking along similar lines. I would love to hear some real-world usages before I'm sold on Atom in this context.

Update: ralphm points to a newer draft on xmpp.org. Thanks!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You might be interested in the most recent version of this draft.

Further, besides its use in Mimír, I am looking into using exactly what you describe for federating social networks.

Erik Onnen said...

Awesome potential application ralphm, thanks for sharing. I'll keep an eye on the project and try to keep the blog up to date with the approach we are taking.