On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 7:40 AM, Richard Hirsch <[email protected]>wrote:
> What I think is also interesting is how Twitter documents this new > API. maybe we can use this as an example. > > What are the advantages of our method vs. their method? > The advantage of their mechanism is that it's a smoother experience. What we've done with chunking/long polling is to simulate a stream of data on top of a non-streaming protocol. What Twitter has done is to say "this is a one-way conversation, we've got an open TCP/IP connection, so let's use it." Implementing what they have would require going below the current set of abstractions that Lift provides above the Servlets. At a practical level, the difference is at one layer... the one dealing with the HTTP requests. At the layers above, events flow either way. > Or are there > basic philosophical differences? > At the basic philosophical level, Twitter's implementation is purer. It treats a stream of information as a stream of information. I like it, but I'm not sure what the benefits would be vs. the development costs of implementing such a mechanism (unless there's an en mass migration of microblogging clients to such a mechanism). > > D. > > On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Ethan Jewett <[email protected]> wrote: > > All, > > > > I hadn't gotten the chance to look at this before, and it is > > interesting. Twitter now has another take on a message-streaming API > > over HTTP, using what looks like a non-HTTP-1.1-compliant form of > > request pipelining (sending multiple responses over a single open > > connection). See the documentation at > > http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation > > > > This is not what we are doing currently. I'd describe our current API > > design as more of a delta-queue approach, while Twitter's design is > > more of a true stream-over-HTTP. > > > > Food for thought. > > > > Ethan > > > -- Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890 Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp Surf the harmonics
