ralphm.net

ralphm's blog

Monday, 29 May 2006

Loopback

XMPP as an integration technology...

While at XTech, I talked with several people about what would happen if we added XMPP to what is currently perceived as The Web™. More people seem to get the value of XMPP for transporting structured data in close to real time. For example, Bill de hÓra writes the following:

[..] XMPP might become a de-facto enterprise integration technology in or around the end of this decade, just like HTTP did at the beginning of the decade. Even as far as syndication technology will take you (and that's probably further than many people expected), the Web is not ideal as an event backbone. Whereas with XMPP and HTTP used side by side, most if not all of the interchange and integration use cases are covered off. [..]

Friday, 19 May 2006

XTech 2006

Almost done, looking forward to BarCamp Amsterdam II...

Being at XTech again is great. My presentation wednesday might not be the best ever, and the room was way too large. If all people visiting XTech would be in the room, it would still have looked empty. On the other hand, speaking to people in between sessions and in the evenings was again inspiring and most people really like the idea of publish-subscribe. Also the suggestion of integrating Jabber facilities into a browser proved to be thought provoking. Also, again, people are dying for a Twisted Python Jabber server implementation.

Alas, today is already the last day of XTech, but fortunately BarCamp Amsterdam II fills that gap. Last year was a great success and I'm sure it will be again.

Friday, 12 May 2006

Planetary developments

What's hot around the galaxy...

After the spin-out of Planet Jabber News from Planet Jabber, I've added a bunch of projects and people to both. The most recent addition to the latter has proved to be an awesome move, as Jean-Louis Seguineau has started writing like mad. Interesting stuff about Jabber/XMPP, Jingle and VoIP. And of course offline offlinestpeter just keeps on spreading the word.

On the Twisted front, I took over the care for Planet Twisted from Mary Gardiner. Just like the Jabber planets and Planet FOSDEM it is hosted at ik.nu, our for-fun hosting provider. The transition went smoothly and as a bonus, the aggregator runs more frequently now.

Friday, 5 May 2006

Publish-subscribe and idleness

Doing nothing?

It appears that our work on the publish-subscribe specification is nearing completion. As we speak we are ironing out the last wrinkles of a pretty large specification, where most changes come in because of better understanding of the issues. After finishing of this work, we can resume discussing PEP and the extended presence proposals.

Relately, jadestorm has ideas on conveying idle-time. He suggests writing a JEP to publish this information via publish-subscribe, but I'd like to point out two existing JEPs that might do the trick.

First off is Time Periods. It allows for annotating a stanza with information about the beginning and/or end of some state, event or activity. This could be used to accompany an automatic away with time the idling started. Getting the current idle-time from that is easy then. Also, it can be used in combination with User Activity. One of the activities is inactive.

Monday, 1 May 2006

Mourning

It has been an odd weekend for me. My previous entry on pgm was written while at work. The news really kicked in when I got home, though. It still is a bit surreal and I'm glad Irma was around to be there for me. Reading the blogs of offline offlinedizzyd, hildjj and offline offlinestpeter I have a vague idea of how it must feel for people much closer to pgm. I'm thinking of you all.