[PP-main] Technical/implementation matters

Nick Lothian Lothian.Nicholas at lmsol.com.au
Mon Mar 6 00:50:53 CET 2000


I disagree. I think RDF has taken off quite well - try and name a site that
doesn't have a RDF backend.

>
> > I could see the value of a central site to register sites that publish
> > stories, but I feel that it should work the way something like UserLand
> > does - sites ask it to check their site every 30 minutes or so, and then
if
> > there is a change, it publishes the stories.
>
[snip]
>
> Time really is of the essence here. I spent a year working in an IS
> department that provided services directly to a wire bureau (a Norwegian
> financial wire service), and the time limits there are daunting. We're
> talking maximum 5 minutes from the news comes in, for the journalist to
write
> up the piece and get it on the wire. I'd like to have a model that can at
> least provide this sort of speed, even though the vast majority of our
stuff
> won't require it.
>
> This is why I want the providers to push items. I'm actually toying with
the
> idea of giving consumer sites the option of having the central server push
> items to them, if they want them. This would be as close to zero-latency
as
> we can get, and I don't think it's significantly heavier on resources.
>

What about when people start writing non-website clients. Think of all the
little "Show Current Stories on Slashdot" applets around. How can a push
protocol handle things like that - especially over a dialup connection?

I do understand the problem that a pull protocol has with low latency.

Perhaps the central server should push information to the other peer-press
servers, and then they should allow frequent polling - this would allow
sharing the load.

I have to admit it is going to take a lot to pursuade me that XML over HTTP
(at least for the user clients to non-central server communication) isn't
the way to go. It is well understood, easy to program, and there are
libraries/components to make programming it easy in just about every
language for every platform.






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