Herewith a few random Atompub pointers. Each month that goes by, I’m happier with the way Atompub came out.
AtomSub? · Brian McCallister, in AtomSub, raised a fascinating idea: “Would be nice to push an AtomPub endpoint to a service as a callback for events... Instead of polling a site for updates, post a subscription with an AtomPub endpoint as the entry and let the service push to you.” I would never have thought of such a thing; hmmmm.
Servers? · Erik Wilde asks AtomPub Servers Anywhere?, which says some smart things. Mind you, he then follows some complaints about the “frustration” of searching for Atompub server-side implementations with a list of five, all in different languages.
Including mod-atom. One reason I’ve been blogging less is actually because I’ve been working on mod-atom, and frankly, it’s of no general interest whatsoever. Yeah, I think mod-atom or something like it is potentially an important piece of the infrastructure, but its actual engineering, inside, is pretty boring. I’ve figured out a trick for creating and destroying publications without hacking the Apache config file. Since then I’ve spent a few days, actually, thinking about how, in the maybe-processes-but-maybe-threads httpd environment, best to keep track of all the active publications when you’re adding and deleting them. Which is pretty hard to do efficiently. But nobody would call it interesting.
While we’re digressing into the subject of my own software, Simon Rozet has been thinking about how to test the Ape. I hang my head in lasting shame in that I haven’t been able to figure out how to unit-test the sucker; let’s hope Simon is smarter.
Astoria · Dare Obasanjo gives us ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) Adopts AtomPub, linking to Pablo Castro’s write-up, which is also interesting.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Rob Koberg (Feb 18 2008, at 13:56)
Couldn't mod_atom be replaced with mod_xslt?
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From: Ciaran (Feb 18 2008, at 14:27)
I unit-tested this post.
s/home/hope/
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From: doug ransom (Feb 18 2008, at 14:30)
Web Services Notification
Simple infrastructure to solve this type of problem.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/specification/ws-notification/
I know Tim is critical of soap and web services, but relative to REST WS-* it makes things pretty darn easy to build.
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From: dret (Feb 18 2008, at 22:02)
regarding the "I’ve figured out a trick for creating and destroying publications without hacking the Apache config file": does that refer to some smart handling of feed metadata using feeds? i recall having seen some small discussion about this on ongoing, with little interest (apart from a google guy saying that they were also doing it, calling them "meta-feeds"). i am asking because we are working with towards these "meta-feeds" as well (this is what i want the atompub implementation for, among other things), and if there is enough interest around managing feeds using feeds, i think it would be worthwhile to see how much effort it would take to define these "meta-feed operations" in an interoperable way.
it might be pretty useful if atompub clients could create and delete collections without having to revert to implementation-specific methods.
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From: Sylvain Hellegouarch (Feb 19 2008, at 04:24)
Regarding AtomSub, it seems to me that XMPP and its PubSub extension would be a great fit. Notably considering the interest Peter Saint-Andre has in Atom and AtomPub.
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