I’m interested in finding out if there are thoughts on making it possible to
use ALTO for realtime data in the future, or at least possible to use it for
data that is being updated quite frequently. Examples of such data could be
available bandwidth on links, available storage capacity in caches or CPU load
in processing resources.
One possible way to enable such use of ALTO could be to provide a pub/sub
option for communication between ALTO clients and servers. Another option is
that clients polls the servers at certain intervals. While the pub/sub
alternative would be nice it probably would mean substantial changes to the
ALTO architecture and protocols. I found an old (2012) draft proposing this
draft-madhavan-alto-subscription-01. Does anyone know if this work has
continued in some shape or form? If not, does anybody have any history to tell
about it? The problem the draft is primarily addressing is to avoid multiple
redundant requests for parameter values that have not changed.
I would like to propose a more lightweight mechanism to reduce this problem. We
could introduce the possibility for responses from ALTO servers to indicate an
expected freshness period for the returned value giving the client a hint to
when it makes sense to make the next request.
I by no means consider myself an ALTO expert, so if this functionality already
is provided in the existing protocols or it has been already discussed at
length, please inform me and accept my apologies for wasting bandwidth on the
mailing list.
Börje Ohlman
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