RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win – washingtonpost.com
[TechCrunch/Washington Post Reports] In the past few months, a lot of attention has been given to the rise of the real-time web. The problem is that the web wasn’t designed with real-time in mind. There is a huge need for the tech community to get behind new protocols that will power this fundamental shift in how web applications work. Today I want to take a look at two of the leading protocols that enable real-time notifications on the web. While there are older protocols that enable real-time notifications like XEP-0060, PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud are two new protocols which show a lot of promise of gaining adoption.
Both PuSH and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today. Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling. Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?” Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time. This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears. Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven. By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new. We’ll tell you.”
via RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win – washingtonpost.com.