[Mod-pubsub-developer] Go forth and decentralize...

[Rohit K. <Ro...@Kn...>]

[feel free to redistribute]

I'm here at Supernova, listening to Jeremy Allaire talkin' 'bout a 
revolution: "Rich clients supporting new programming models, based on 
Web Services with real-time, persistent messages streaming between PCs 
and edge devices -- enabling two-way, even N-way, collaboration."

As Apple once famously advertised: Welcome.

Three years later, KnowNow's founding vision has become conventional 
enough wisdom that we're announcing mod_pubsub, a new open-source 
project to add decentralized event notification to the Web -- and, by 
the way, transform an ordinary Web browser into a rich client without 
installing any new software.

Jeremy added, "The industry discussion of Web Services has been far too 
focused on back-end, app-to-app integration." Amen! There's huge 
potential in making the "last mile" all the way to the edge intelligent 
as well, not dumbed down into pixel-pushing languages like HTML and 
Flash.

Mod_pubsub exposes a bit of this vision as well. It's an experiment on 
KnowNow's part to circulate lots of the prototype code we wrote in our 
first year, including not only instant messaging & presence, but even 
SOAP services to the desktop and XML content routing.

It's a very flexible toolkit, though inherently performance-limited 
(it's a Perl CGI script). We expect experimentation will be good for 
the community and for KnowNow, Inc.

Have at it!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-pubsub