TYPO3 & Jabber Publish-Subscribe
A while ago, herb
contacted me because he was writing his thesis in Brazil. He said he was
very interested in my work on Publish-Subscribe
using Jabber. So, I said: Ask away
. Just now he contacted
me again, stating that he was very interested in testing out Mimír and that he was busy working on
an RSS component for the TYPO3
Content Management System.
I don't know any CMS systems that well, but I am told that TYPO3 is a great, powerful, Open Source CMS. Herb's plan is to hook up TYPO3 up to Jabber, using pubsub to publish items to interested parties. Very nice! I've written about Mimír on a few occasions, and initiatives like this might bring us further to the goal of having news pushed to you instead of having to pull it yourself.
I've set up a pubsub node
(mimir/news/typo3_test) for him for testing, and had
the Mimír news bot subscribe to it for its accociated channel. The only
thing he has to implement is some magic to send a snippet like this to
the pubsub component:
<iq to="pubsub.ik.nu" type="set">
<pubsub xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub">
<publish node="mimir/news/typo3_test">
<item id="{$url}">
<news xmlns="mimir:news">
<title>{$title}</title>
<link>{$url}</link>
<description>{$description}</description>
</news>
</item>
</publish>
</pubsub>
</iq>Of course, the stuff in curly brackets needs to be filled in. At the moment Mimír uses a simple proprietary namespace for holding the data, but I can imagine using a format like Atom for this instead. Anyway, herb has not coded anything so far, but I'll keep you posted of his progress. If anyone is interested, let me know.
By coincidence, I had been thinking about the future of Mimír again this morning (under the shower, good thinking place). Ideally, when systems like TYPO3 have pubsub capabilities, you would want to optimize the distribution of notifications. For now, the pubsub JEP only talks about direct subscribers, but it would be far more efficient in terms of bandwidth and speed to have a distribution tree, where the root of the tree is the original content provider, the leaves are the end users (human or not), and the nodes in between pubsub repeaters. Compare with mirrors of websites and the way real world gossiping works.
I think I'll be working on that next. Maybe we need a JEP on that. For verifying the origin of a notifications, you could use either trusted repeaters, or signed notifications.