01st avr 2008
More than just Instant Messaging: publication and notification using Jabber/XMPP
Jabber (also called XMPP, as a protocol standardized l’IETF) is well known for being “just” an instant messaging system (and network) which can be compared to ICQ, Yahoo!, Live Messenger, AIM, Gadu-Gadu or others. But it is in fact far more. As a very young protocol for real-time communication, new features are continuously imagined, developped and improved. One of these features can be very interesting and may prove to have a nice future, in my own opinion: this is the “Publish-Subscribe” (abbreviated into pubsub).
As the name implies, this system enables users with a role of “publishers” and others as “subscribers”. Hence the publishers will obviously “publish” information on a Jabber node (with is simply a term defining some kind of Jabber address), whereas the subscribers will have the possibility to read this information, and configure their subscription according to their needs. For instance a common use would be to ask being notified when new information is added. This last use case gave me the idea to developp a small plugin for Wordpress (the publishing system used for this website), which I called: Jabber Feed.
Jabber Feed will enable readers of this website for instance to subscribe to a Jabber node, then asking to be notified in realtime of every new post, or even comment. People could compare this to RSS feed, though Jabber Feed has many advantages: it is realtime, it spares bandwith, and it can be highly customizable.
Yet the main big problem is that it is hardly supported currently by most Jabber clients (even the more advanced ones; for pubsub, Gajim being the better I have tried), and by servers but with many lacks of the full protocol (as far as I have tried at least). Thus my plugin is rather a Proof of Concept as for now. Anyway I will regularly improve it and update news on this development here. Hopefully soon more clients will have a better support. I created also a permanent page about it here and the code can be foundable on the official Wordpress’ plugin repository).
I will give later a node for my public diary (the one you are reading!) because someone noticed it is apparently unsubscribable from an exterior address and I have no time to look how to configure my server as I am leaving for 2 weeks of hollydays in Japan in a few hours.
So see you then!
Edit: here is the notification I received in Gajim (last subversion). This is not much, it does not support full content currently, but it is the only client (among the ones I have tested) which notified me at least!
A v 0.2 is getting out soon! It will be very much improved.