Atom Over XMPP for new readers
Receiving Movim updates without Movim.
XMPP as a syndication platform for news readers and all other software.
About
This article is an abstract of a proposal for news readers to support XMPP as a platform to receive updates from.
PubSub
XMPP is known for its extension system known as XEP.
Two decades ago, a new extension known as XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe was created and is extensively utilized, today, for content publishing by the publishing systems and social platforms such as Libervia and Movim.
The premier systems that deliver syndicated content via XMPP are Libervia and Movim.
The software that allow to receive news updates are Movim and Reeder, and Movim being the the most common and effective mean to receive syndicated content via XMPP.
The data can be in any form. It can be Plain Text, HTML and even Binary data.
News readers
A News Reader (also referred to as Feed Reader or RSS Reader) is a software to receive news updates from structured files such as XML (Atom, RDF and RSS) and JSON (JSON Feed) files.
XMPP
The XMPP platform, using the specification of Atom Over XMPP which is implemented by Libervia (XEP-0277) and Movim (XEP-0472) can be utilized as a competitive plaform to HTTP.
Projects
There are a couple of projects that successfully demonstrate this.
Reeder
The project Reeder is an XMPP-based feeds reader.
Reeder is a syndication feeds reader with the particularity that is purely based on XMPP PubSub. This means, that the content which Reeder fetches, comes from XMPP PubSub services.
Rivista XJP
The project Rivista XJP serves as an HTTP gateway to XMPP by retrieving node items that are structured by the specification Atom Over XMPP and returning the data as Atom Syndication Format.
Jappix Me, Libervia and Movim already do this.
Benefits
Bandwidth
Instead of polling updates from HTTP over and over, and consequntly suject servers to overload, XMPP updates can be retrieved in real time by an active action from the server where a subject feed is located at (i.e. "push notification" so called).
Subscribe
XMPP allows to subscribe to PubSub nodes and to a specific PubSub node item.
Subscribing to XMPP PubSub nodes is negotiated on the server (the XMPP server of your account and the XMPP server of the subject node item).
Communities
Once XMPP is utilized, it would be simple to start thriving and active communities by the people who already utilize XMPP as a publishing platform.
Updates
The original intention of the specification Atom Over XMPP was to deliver syndicated news updates, yet the very same specification has been further developed as a mean to manage discussion forums (see Libervia) and also to manage bookmarks (see Blasta), and obviously that system can be utilized as an update check system or a news system of and for the news reader developers.
Conclusion
XMPP can provide solutions for publishing and syndication to news readers and any other software that there is.
Projects that support XMPP for syndication are expected to have a larger audience, new business opportunities and a saner community.
Potential projects
Projects that incorporate telecommunication means with HTML parsers and projects that support syndication are subjected to consider to adopt XMPP as an additional mean of syndication.
Homesites
Tickets
A - Accepted
C - Completed
P - Pending
R - Rejected