Courtesy of Mike Dierken we found Bill de hÓra’s “WWW cubed: syndication and scale”, in which he writes:

The most advanced thinking that doesn’t involve throwing out the Web is probably Rohit Khare’s PhD thesis, which suggests an ‘eventing’, or push style extension to the Web model. An early example of this approach where the server calls back to the connected client instead of the client initiating each time, called mod_pubsub, is available as open source. One of HTTP’s designers, Roy Fielding, is rumoured to be working on a new protocol, that could feature support for easing of the load on servers.

The question of responsibility – especially in the event of operational issues arising – becomes complex. With a pull delivery model on the other hand, organisational boundaries are crisp and clear.” This may not matter for consumer applications, but a surprising number of important business systems and services are now based on HTTP data transfers. And many people believe that syndication technology like RSS and Atom will also be used for commercially consequential exchanges in the b2b, or “business to business” arena. Switching from a polling to a pushing mode, also confers a switching of responsibilities, and this might in time have far-reaching consequences where cost-efficiency is traded for risks, legal and financial. One day, your online bank might be morally and technically culpable for getting your bank statements to your computer. In that case, expect to sign even more of your rights away in the fine print.

The Now Economy will be guided by all kinds of Service Level Agreements. Empowerment comes when people understand the benefits — and, more importantly, the limitations and risks inherent — in moving to a world where information travels to where it needs to go instantly and across trust boundaries.

There’s a lot of great things going on with the continuing evolution of Interplanetary IP into IETF’s Delay-Tolerant Networking group into a DARPA BAA on Disruption-Tolerant Networking (already closed on 9 July, unfortunately).

Proposers Day Announcement – Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN)

The Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) Program will develop and field technology that will provide network services when no end-to-end path exists through the network.  The primary goal is to provide disruption tolerance by organizing information flow into bundles.  These bundles will be routed through an ?intelligent? DTN network that can manage the delivery of the bundles.  This method will allow messages to pass through the network with successive responsibilities, rather than the traditional end-to-end acknowledgement scheme.  DTN will result in the opportunistically leveraged connectivity and the use of multiple routes while relieving the delivery node of final acknowledgement.

The second goal of DTN is to provide dynamic network naming and routing.  This method uses a late-binding of bundles (or packets) technique to specific nodes or delivery path.  This avoids forcing all parts of the network to be aware of all other parts of the network.  The result will be a network that matches the tactical unit deployment needs for mobility and stealth.  

The Proposers’ Day Workshop will be held on 21 January 2004 at the George Mason University

Latency matters — and embedded within this little trick forced by Reg NMS, is an agency conflict to boot: who’s really motivated to give me, the little guy, the best possible price??

NYSE To Further Upgrade Automated Execution System

The New York Stock Exchange next week will unveil a plan for further upgrading its automated execution system, Direct Plus, to enable more trades to be processed electronically. Earlier this year, the NYSE upgraded the system to handle orders of any size and to let investors use the system as often and as rapidly as they like; previously, Direct Plus was restricted to order sizes of less than 1,100 shares and investors had to wait 30 seconds before entering another order.

Thain proposes new electronic trading for NYSE

The NYSE plan is an effort to meet an SEC definition of “fast market” under trading rules proposed in February. That SEC definition would allow the NYSE to keep a large portion of its order flow. But the move to electronic trading will move business away from the floor. Friday was the deadline for comments on the watchdog agency’s Regulation NMS, or national market system.

Today’s Trade-Through Rule Must Die

The trade-through rule, which was first instituted in 1975, was designed to make sure investors got the best available price for their stock trade. A market system would not allow one customer to “trade through” an existing order without first matching that order. A customer’s order has to be routed to the destination with the best price at the moment the order is entered.

That sounds like a good idea on the surface, but the rule was enacted before electronic markets existed. Though it’s moving in the direction of automation, the NYSE is still at heart a manual system, with trades handled by specialists in particular stocks.

Nasdaq, however, is fully automated, so while a quote on a Nasdaq stock is currently executable, a quote on an NYSE stock is considered an indication and not a firm quote.

The trade-through rule as it stands means that if you place an order and the best possible quote is with a particular specialist on the floor of the NYSE, then your broker is required to route your order there. But a NYSE quote is not immediately executable–it’s more analogous to an advertised price than an actual price.

Specialists are allowed to hold an order for 30 seconds before either executing it or handing it off to another specialist—and during that time, the price may change.

Matthias Nicola – Homepage

Matthias Nicola, Jasmi John: “XML Parsing: A Threat to Database Performance”, 12th Intl. Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM’2003, New Orleans, November 2003.

This paper, referred to me by Rick Ross, is a fascinating indictment of the inadequacy of XML for large-scale, real-world applications today. Fits in with other work at IBM on this that I saw at WWW2004 in NYC. I’m concerned that there aren’t any other companies than IBM and perhaps DataPower and Sarvega that even hint at working on hardware-assisted XML processing…