PubSub Chains And Queues

October 8, 2008

There are two new XMPP PubSub extensions being proposed at the XSF. The first one is for pubsub chaining, and this defines how a pubsub node subscribes and re-publishes items from one or more local or remote pubsub nodes. The second is for pubsub queueing, which enables queue like behavior for a pubsub node. These ideas are young and fresh, and the XSF would love your feedback on them.

Chaining

Pubsub chaining can be used for a number of problems. The most interesting to me is its potential for use in aggregation of pubsub content. In the scenario where microblogs are just PEP or pubsub nodes, it is very useful to aggregate all of the microblog nodes under a single feed for use by third party service providers. It could also be used to establish and manage pubsub based planets.

Queueing

Pubsub queueing is an attempt to map a queue like API onto pubsub nodes. While some people are building pubsub on top of queues, this proposed extensions builds queues on top of pubsub. This could be extremely useful for decoupling applications or spreading workload to an army of worker processes.

We Need Help

There is still much work to be done, and several of us have been proposing changes and additions on the pubsub mailing list. Please come and participate and share your use cases, feature ideas, and feedback.

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