On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 04:28, Pádraic Brady <[email protected]> wrote: > With all the protocol comparisons, people have overlooked the obvious. Ask > yourself a serious question, how many web developers (or even small app > developers) actually have a clue about SMTP, NNTP or even (though slowly > growing) XMPP? Compare that to HTTP. A developer's pet cat probably knows > all about HTTP about now ;). Pubsubhubbub has the benefit of being so simple > and obvious, that implementing it is exceptionally easier - irrespective of > the technical advantages/disadvantages of other alternatives.
a friend was recently hiring web developers: he asked each of them to describe a simple GET request, start to finish. 1 our of 30 could answer. this was just last week here in boulder for a highly paid gov't position. the power of any computing system does not lie exclusively with being understood - the main power lies in it's power to abstract difficult problems. ssh is a class example here - no one understands it and yet all of us use it successfully every day. if SMTP were like the c++ compiler standard and had taken 15 years to complete you might have something, but the reality is that it was easy enough and it's done. here is the result of running my 'lines of code' counter on ruby's built-in smtp library cfp:1.8$ loc net/smtp.rb 260 it takes about 20 more to add TLS support. that is simple enough. -- -a -- be kind whenever possible... it is always possible - h.h. the 14th dalai lama
