<cloud>

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

In article <08b701c19c58$7336f080$33a1dc40@murphy>, Dave Winer
<dave@userland.com> writes
>We believe in decentralization. We want to drive features that are really
>P2P, right now the pub-sub stuff is centralized on our community server, but
>Mike Krus just announced that he's supporting it on NewsIsFree. I want to
>try to bootstrap a community of people running full peers on their desktop,
>we have more software coming for this, and a centralized server is not the
>answer although it was in 1999, but this is 2002.

I've just seen Mike's announcements of support for the 0.92 <cloud> tag.

I'm trying to get my head round the implications of this. My hosted
aggregator at voidstar.com could make use of this, as well as acting as
a cloud domain for it's own RSS feeds. (I'm quite tempted to write this
anyway as another exercise in xml-rpc programming, we already support
the weblogs ping and blogger APIs) But my home aggregator, which is
where I read all my news these days, couldn't use it as it's behind a
home firewall.

This brings up the issue of how to go about two way XML-RPC when one or
other side is behind a firewall and isn't directly accessible. One route
to this would be to use another transport protocol like jabber or smtp
instead of http to get the message through. Another pattern would be
some sort of relay server.

I'm also all for de-centralization wherever possible. But each time we
build something, we hit the firewall/NAT problem again.

-- 
Julian Bond    email: julian_bond@voidstar.com
CV/Resume:         http://www.voidstar.com/cv/
WebLog:               http://www.voidstar.com/
M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173  T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
ICQ:33679568 tag:So many words, so little time