Showing posts with label jabber pep pubsub. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jabber pep pubsub. Show all posts

Saturday, May 26, 2007

General PubSub (PEP) receiver?

Recently, Artur Hefczyc from Tigase project implemented a StanzaReceiver module, which is, simplified, a general pubsub-like interface, but uses a general <message/> stanza with body instead of pubsub stanzas.

This gave an idea of having a general event receiver component of clients: if a pubsub / pep node can't be handled by one of those special protocols (like: User Avatar, User Tune, etc.), then just pop up in a window somehow.



(Mockup created with OmniGraffle, using CC photo from flickr user Bhalash, just to give the credits.)

Why?

Client compatibility is always a bottleneck. If we do PEP a general protocol over User Tune, User Mood etc, we don't have one new protocol to implement: we have a new one for every capability. Isn't it easier, to, let's say, have a "<human-readeable/>" field for every possible solution, and if a client can't handle such event, well, it simply falls back to a default method?

Basically, we still have 3 types of messages: a direct one, a broadcast one, and a get-set pair of them. We know that we just want to 'broadcast' something, in hope that this will be understood by most of our peers - but what happens if not? I think end users would benefit from such.

I don't want to force anybody to anything, just trying to get the flexibility of pubsub and the obvious reasons why StanzaReceiver was created get together :)