[Social] Going Social

[Jeff McAdams]

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Jeff McAdams wrote:
>> I'm Jeff McAdams, I help out with running IEMChat (https://iemchat.com),
>> a resource for National Weather Service employees to coordinate and
>> collaborate with TV meteorologists, some Emergency Management offices,
>> and others in monitoring and responding to all sorts of weather, with an
>> emphasis on severe weather.  IEMChat features iembot, which posts in MUC
>> rooms for each weather forecast office the NWS products that are
>> relevant to that office.  Daryl, the originator of IEMChat, and I are
>> both interested in developing more sophisticated capabilities for
>> IEMChat and iembot.  

> Yes that's a cool service. Good work!

Daryl really gets the credit...I try to help out where I can and
hopefully provide him some good ideas to run with.  :)

>> There is also a "for public" version of IEMChat
>> that I host on the server at the company where I work.  iembot is the
>> fastest way that I've seen to get severe weather alerts from the
>> NWS...because its completely implemented without polling at all!

> What's the public address?

Oh, der...guess I could've included that.  :/

iembot runs in the chat channels at muc.appriss.com.  Each channel is of
the pattern zz???chat.  Replace the "???" with the code of the NWS
weather forecast office for your area.  I'm in Louisville, so we're LMK,
meaning the channel is zzlmkchat.  Denver is BOU, so zzbouchat.  You can
look at the NWS map at www.weather.gov to figure out what the code is
for your location (look at the URL when you mouse over).  I prepended
the channels with "zz" so they'd sort to the bottom and avoid them
interfering so much with Appriss' corporate use of the MUC.

>> I'd love to see some discussion about getting XMPP in a position to
>> replace HTTP on a much broader scale than most seem to be talking about.
>>  Most of the discussions of replacing HTTP with XMPP seem to be about
>> niche functionalities.  I have a vision of seeing a web browser that
>> only uses XMPP, no HTTP at all.  Using a proxy (found via service
>> discovery, of course) to gateway web requests encapsulated in XMPP back
>> out onto the HTTP web.  I can't think of any reason that this shouldn't
>> work, and having an extant code base of a browser that does XMPP should
>> help encourage more innovative uses of an XMPP transport beyond just
>> making a request and getting a response...cutting down polling being
>> just the obvious first step.

> Why? I'm more of an XMPP fanatic than all but 2 or 3 people on the
> planet, but I don't see a compelling reason to get rid of HTTP...

I don't really want to do away with HTTP as a whole, but I think a fully
XMPP based browser would be a fantastic demonstration.

As it is, people think HTTP until they run into a problem that's hard to
solve in HTTP and then they start searching around for another
technology to help them solve their problem...  Well, they search around
if they're able to break their paradigm...seemingly most people just
continue to bash their heads against HTTP until they get some semblance
of almost working.

You get a browser out there that *only* does XMPP (using XMPP to talk to
a proxy to go out HTTP for "legacy" connections ;), and you use that as
a way to get people to think about XMPP first, or at least consider it
sooner.

I downloaded an Ubuntu ISO today...I really have no desire to run the
roughly 700MB of data for that ISO through my ejabberd, HTTP is better
suited for a bulk transfer like that.  But to show that you *could* send
it through XMPP would be a powerful demonstration and hopefully get
through to some people.  Particularly if you combine it with other cool
demonstrations of what you could do with an XMPP based browser.

It would also make for an interesting development platform, to have
Javascript'y access to the browser DOM with a truly async-capable
communications channel like XMPP to support it.  That would eliminate a
huge part of the polling problem, but the possibilities go *way* beyond
that.


Anyway...I fear this is drifting a bit off-topic, though perhaps not.
*shrug*  That's kinda my vision, anyway...to get people to quit thinking
of XMPP as a fallback protocol when they run into problems with HTTP,
but to think of XMPP as at least a peer to HTTP on equal footing, if not
superior, with a fallback to HTTP when XMPP isn't a good fit.

-- 
Jeff McAdams
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
                                       -- Benjamin Franklin

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