One of the primary thrusts of our work at CN Labs will be a new kind of internet-scale event notification service: an application-layer router. Just like there’s an IP packet format at the network layer, there ought to be a new standard that unifies the welter of application-layer protocols: smTP, htTP, fTP, nnTP, and more.
TP, a Transfer Protocol, merely provides a best-effort delivery service for named, MIME-typed bags of bits. Rather than using IP addresses, those names are the endpoints that identify multiple services.
If I want a $5 increase in IBM stock price to pop up an alert in my browser, I ought to be able to request something like
“send all messages about http://nyse.com/IBM?delta>5
to javascript://rohits-laptop/window1/alert(‘sell!’)”
There’s a lot more to this idea, whether you call it bringing pub/sub to the web, or bringing programmable agents to mail, or some other unification of those messaging middleware modes. Watch this space to see what we can pull together…