I’d been hearing the terms ‘PubSubHubbub’ (silly name) and ‘rssCloud’ a lot lately, and decided I ought to figure out what the heck these people are talking about. Just in time, along comes Josh Fraser with a guest post on TechCrunch, RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win.
Both [PubSubHubbub] and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today. Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling. Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?” Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time. This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears. Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven. By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new. We’ll tell you.”
While Fraser favors PubSubHubbub, he apparently agrees that the name just doesn’t work, and refers to it throughout his piece as ‘PuSH’. If fate is kind, that name will win out. (Or else it will get submitted to IETF, and given a nondescript acronym, a la Jabber’s rehabilitation as the more businesslike XMPP.)