Teepee
One of the primary thrusts of our work at CN Labs will be a new kind of internet-scale event notification service: an application-layer router. Just like there’s an IP packet format at the network layer, there ought to be a new standard that unifies the welter of application-layer protocols: smTP, htTP, fTP, nnTP, and more.
TP, a Transfer Protocol, merely provides a best-effort delivery service for named, MIME-typed bags of bits. Rather than using IP addresses, those names are the endpoints that identify multiple services.
If I want a $5 increase in IBM stock price to pop up an alert in my browser, I ought to be able to request something like
“send all messages about http://nyse.com/IBM?delta>5
to javascript://rohits-laptop/window1/alert(’sell!’)”
There’s a lot more to this idea, whether you call it bringing pub/sub to the web, or bringing programmable agents to mail, or some other unification of those messaging middleware modes. Watch this space to see what we can pull together…
August 20th, 2004 at 4:15 pm
You hit it on the head by noting that delta can only be measured w.r.t. some notion of the past. So in fact, perhaps that route could only be interpreted by a router willing to work hard on your behalf. But it does at least hint at the notion that somewhat-interesting filtering and aggregation rules can be pushed around the network, not just put as burdens on the publisher or subscriber directly.
I suppose an alternative approach would be to posit an alternate topic: http://FastBrokers.com/BigMovers/5-bucks/IBM — basically, anytime data feeds get “refined” into a higher form, they need new IDs.
Now here’s a pernicious follow-on thought: how far could one go with GUIDs for “topics”? does it help to make them un-readable?