I have been thinking about this for a little bit now, and I'm really
excited. What I'm thinking is we use RSS to syndicate server health
information. For example, we could have a simple feed with an
article for each application loaded into the server, and the content
of the article is health information about the application. This way
and admin just needs to check his RSS browser every morning to see
what is up.
Even better... we could make the system easily accessible to users,
so they could write a custom feed that contains information health
specific about their application. I think this will lead to a lot of
innovation, and be an easy way for new users to familiarize them
selves with the internal workings of Geronimo.
I'm excited so as you said "great, why don't you get started on
that". Is there anything I can do to help you get started? Also I'm
normally on irc all day so if you want realtime help just connect to
#geronimo on the freenode.net.
-dain
On Jun 6, 2005, at 10:59 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
You could look at this as an application service that would enable
blogging and podcasting applications.
Alternately, you could look at it more abstractly as a generic
subscription and notification system...a lightweight JMS type
thing. For example, RSS/Atom could be used to enable someone to
subscribe to a category of a product catalog, where notifications
would get sent out if there were any additions to, removals from,
or updates of products in that category. This service could also be
used in workflow design patterns for routing events. The
notifications don't have to be human readable. The feeds could
contain any sort of XML meta data that gets consumed by another
service or application. Feed subscriptions will eventually be
customizable using rules and preferences for filtering, combining,
and republishing feeds...enabling new kinds of aggregation solutions.
You asked how Geronimo could possibly take advantage of this as a
system service. I suppose that developers or system administrators
might want to subscribe to certain system events that typically get
logged and have them presented and delivered in a nicely formatted
RSS/Atom feed. I don't really see it appropriate for any inter-
service communication within a Geronimo node at this point.
However, RSS/Atom could be used to implement an aggregation service
framework that runs across many Geronimo nodes or perhaps to
support the management of those nodes.
That said, I suspect that RSS/Atom will always be focused on
content applications. I see podcasting evolving into a multimedia
distribution system leveraging other technologies like BitTorrent
and DRM with a real potential to become the TiVo for the internet.
This system will require complex solutions such as for matching the
right content types and formats with compatible devices. I spent a
couple of years working on a JSR 124 implementation and see a lot
of parallels with how ring tones and MIDlets currently get
provisioned on mobile phones and how the RSS/Atom space is evolving.
Scott
On Jun 6, 2005, at 9:26 PM, Dain Sundstrom wrote:
On Jun 5, 2005, at 5:25 PM, Scott Anderson wrote:
I would be interested in a standard "RSS Syndication/Aggregation
Service" getting included with a future Geronimo distribution. In
my mind this service would make it easy for developers and
content providers to...
1) serve up dynamically generated RSS feeds
2) subscribe to remote feeds with support for filtering and/or
combining feeds and then republishing them (XSLT?)
3) manage subscriptions
4) provide statistics on feed usage
I suspect that the Geronimo dev team's response to this request
will be something like..."great, why don't you get started on
that". Hopefully, others have been thinking along these same
lines though. I will be attempting find some time to work on a
ROME GBean (https://rome.dev.java.net/) in the short to medium
term. I'll be happy to share that code with any interested
parties once I have something. No guarantees on when that'll be.
If anyone has suggestions on how to structure this service, how
to integrate with it, or what features you think are important,
I'd be happy to hear from you here.
Interesting idea. I'm not too familiar with rss other then rss
feeds from blogs and new sites. What sort of information do you
see Geronimo serving via RSS? I mean I'm sure we could serve
general information like blogs, but I'm curious if we could use
this for management of some kind or something totally different.
Again cool idea,
-dain
