[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
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