Friday, 31 December 2004
Another good year gone by...
We spent the last few days of this year in Barcelona and had a very
good time at that, as you can see from the photos. I still have to add
some comments, but for now you can just watch the nice pictures.
As you can see, it is oliebollen
time again. Just as last year, we're partying with a couple of friends
to end this very good year. I've finished my Masters', got a new job
and even got married!
On the Jabber front, I've gotten into the Jabber Council, and did
some work in the publish/subscribe
arena. I also helped in doing some promotion at FOSDEM, although I couldn't make
it to Brussels myself.
For the coming year, I plan to do more coding to actually use
the standards we think up, and will definately go to FOSDEM and maybe
even get involved in organizing a European Jabber developers conference. We'll see how that works out.
For now, have a good party tonight and a good beginning of
2005!
Saturday, 25 December 2004
Here we come!
I'm off to Barcelona, Spain, for a few days, along with my wife, of
course. People tell us it is a beautiful city, so I'm pretty excited.
I'll point to the photos when we get back. Adios!
Wednesday, 22 December 2004
Jabber Developers in Europe: meet up!
As I mentioned
back in August, FOSDEM, the
Free and Open source Software Developers Europe Meeting, will take
place again in 2005, on 26 and 27 February. This is an ideal event for
Jabber developers to meet up, and spread the word in the greater
community of Free and Open Source Software developers.
For this edition I applied for a booth,
just like the 2004 edition, but also for a Developers Room. I just
received a message that my request was approved and committed, along
with the request to submit a schedule for the Developers Room. They
need a list of speakers, presentations and subjects. I plan do a
presentation on the development of Jabber powered applications using
Publish/Subscribe.
But I need more than that, of course. Anyone who is planning on
attending FOSDEM 2005, and wants to do a presentation in the Developers
Room, please let me know, via Jabber. I am also open for suggestions
for other uses of this room.
Saturday, 4 December 2004
Pushing it...
In a post on Examples
of notifications via XMPP, melo wonders if
Mimír receives updates from
PubSub.com using JEP-0060.
Well, it doesn't, unfortunately. But that's not because of Mimír's architecture.
If you look at the graph on the architecture page, you can see the
news bot receiving pubsub notifications from the pubsub component (it
uses
Idavoll for this).
Each channel has one pubsub node on this pubsub service, and for most
channels the news items are published to their node by a RSS
aggregrator using JEP-0060. The only reason is backwards compatibility:
no news providers sends out news using JEP-0060, yet. So the aggregator
polls the different RSS feeds and turns them in pubsub
publishes.
But the aggregator is not really part of Mimír. Currently there
is one channel that isn't fed using the aggregator, but publishes
new items directly using JEP-0060: this blog. I've written a small
python script that reads the DocBook-like source files of this blog
and transforms the latest entry into a payload for the pubsub publish
using XSLT, and sends it off. Every subscriber to the node is
immediately notified. The only subscriber is the News bot, and
it processes it further to store the item in the database, and sends
all (available) channel subscribers a text notification.
If you think about that, the News bot is actually a pubsub service
in itself. It accepts real
JEP-0060 notifications
for publishing content, and uses regular chat messages for the
notification of end-users. I selectively sends those messages depending
on subscriber presence, and has the side effect of marking unread items
and making them available via a web interface. In fact, I intend to
reimplement Mimír as an application specific implementation of a pubsub
service, using Idavoll. That would allow it to send out JEP-0060
notifications to end-users, too, which could become very useful
when client supports becomes available. That could be in Jabber
IM clients, but dedicated desktop news readers could also be JEP-0060
powered.
So what about PubSub.com's JEP-0060 notifications? The issue here
is that PubSub.com's pubsub service doesn't allow server to server
connections, and therefore does not exploit the distributed nature of
the Jabber network. Every user has to login to the service directly. A
real pity, in my opinion. I could work around this by making a small
repeater client that logs into both xmpp.pubsub.com
and ik.nu, receives the notifications from the
first, and then resends the payload in a new publish to
pubsub.ik.nu. For now, I just aggregate the RSS
feeds that PubSub also publishes using HTTP, which delays the
notification to Mimír users to at most 30 minutes, the polling period
of the aggregator. It feels kind of strange to have to fall back to
this legacy support, though.
Wednesday, 1 December 2004
Prince Bernhard, the father of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands,
has died at age 93. Coverage on numerous
sites. Good bye, and thanks for everything!
