Jabber notification subscriptions

Proposed by: Wim Leers

UPDATE:

Originally I intended this as my own project proposal, but - unexpectedly - I was given the opportunity for working on a new startup, which is of course even better than SoC. If somebody would like to continue with this proposal, the SoC mentors may decide whom is the best candidate.
Users who contacted me: wwei (on February 21).

Motivation

Many of us, if not most, try to keep up with the news through feeds (RSS/Atom). We receive notification of new replies on forums and bugtrackers through e-mail notifications or, (again) feeds. And last but not least: we communicate with others through instant messaging (MSN/Yahoo!/AOL/Jabber).

News is mostly not personal and can be quite extensive, depending on the kind of news covered. However, forum replies for example, are personal. A content approval message and new content that matches certain criteria (for example John Doe would only want to be notified if a forum topic was submitted in forum X or new content tagged with "Drupal" was submitted). Wouldn't it be great if we received these notifications directly in our IM client?

That's what I'd like to do with this module: allow us to receive instant notifications through the Jabber/XMPP protocol directly into our IM client. There's a protocol designed just for this: XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe.

This document specifies an XMPP protocol extension for generic publish-subscribe functionality.

...

As Jabber/XMPP technologies have matured, the need for a generic publish-subscribe ("pubsub") mechanism has arisen in a number of problem spaces. These include (but are not limited to): news feeds and content syndication, ..., workflow systems, ..., and event notification.

In all of these domains, it is desirable for data communication to follow the classic "publish-subscribe" or "observer" design pattern: a person or application publishes information, and an event notification or the data itself is broadcasted to all authorized subscribers. In general, the relationship between the publisher and subscriber is mediated by a service that receives publication requests, broadcasts event notifications and/or the data itself to subscribers, and enables privileged entities to manage lists of people or applications that are authorized to publish or subscribe. In most pubsub services, the focal point for publication and subscription is a "topic" or "node" to which publishers send data and from which subscribers receive notifications and/or data. Additionally, some nodes may also maintain a history of events and provide other services that supplement the pure pubsub model.

...

Ideally, this functionality should seamlessly integrate with and require the Subscriptions module, to prevent duplicate functionality.

Comments on this proposal

This is doable
Boris Mann - February 17, 2007 - 03:39

And also fantastic :P

The Jabber community is diving into Drupal. I would suspect that they might want to co-sponsor such a module. I'll look into pinging folks there.

--
The future is Bryght.
======================================================
======================================================

This project opens for wider perspectives than 'just' IM...
Tiburón - February 21, 2007 - 15:37

@Boris: I have sent the link to this project to Peter Saint-Andre (XSF Executive Director). First reaction was "very nice" so... :-)

In case someone is wondering: XSF = XMPP Standards Foundation which is formerly known as Jabber Software Foundation. See also the Jabber/XMPP developer community site.

This is a great project with wider perspectives than 'just' receiving notifications via IM.

Back in 2003 when I first read a draft of XEP-0060 I started thinking about using Publish-Subscribe to replace the the pull system of feeds and aggregators which is generating a lot of needless traffic when there are no updates and you may loose posts if the aggregator is turned of for a relative short while.

Well ... the time was not right back then and I kept getting sidetracked on other projects so.... :-(

At BarCamp Copenhagen 2006 I did an improvised pitch (had prepared one but ended up doing three non related topics) on the topic of moving to XMPP for communication needs (IM, mail, ...) and one of the examples was using XMPP and Publish-Subscribe to send out notifications of new content on a site rather than using feeds :-).

It is sort of a revival of push technology but in a more useful way than say the screen savers for news reading and advertisement back in the late 1990s. I mean the screen savers ran when the computer was not used which I guess that usually means that no one is at the computer to actually read the news and see the advertisements. There was a lot of buzz back then about push technology...

This project definitely gets my vote :-)

Regards,

Christian Larsen
======================================================
======================================================

Boris, please ask someone in the know to finish
robertDouglass - March 9, 2007 - 08:05

This proposal is still very loose and unstructured. Can you ping some people who understand these technologies to come in and help clean it up a bit? Thanks.

- Robert Douglass

-----
Lullabot | my Drupal book
======================================================
======================================================

I think it's a wonderful
sshvetsov - February 17, 2007 - 18:07

I think it's a wonderful idea. E-mail notifications clutter the inbox and it's way to trivial/short for RSS. Jabber / GTalk (if it supports it) notifications would be awesome.
======================================================
======================================================

Really great idea ... Thumbs Up !
anarus - February 26, 2007 - 10:15

Really great idea ... drupal community is definitely going to be benefited from this project.
I think this project is more general than it seems and I am sure most of drupal users would like to use it somehow.

From the users point of view, Now users have access to the info they wanna get updates about right in their choice of Messenger client as most of the biggies like Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Jabber and GTalk all supporting XMPP protocol, which is really cool. If users are happy so the drupal community...

Definitely this project need to be worked out...
Thumbs Up for this project...
======================================================
======================================================

Really?
Standart - March 29, 2007 - 03:40

Maybe I miss something here? Do Yahoo IM, MSN, AIM, etc support XMPP? I thought to use the proposed functionality you would need a jabber client that supports XEP-0060, right?
Please give me a hint how this could work with the proprietary clients and what jabber clients will support the proposed solution.
======================================================
======================================================

I would be happy to give this a shot...
VokinLoksar - March 4, 2007 - 14:54

Hello everyone!

I'm one of the many people who'll be trying to get into the Summer of Code program this year, and seeing how much desire there is for this sort of functionality, I thought I'd express my interest in working on this project over the summer (that is unless someone else beat me to it :) ). At any rate, if that's not the case then I'll submit my official application when it's time, but until then, I'm more than happy to hear other ideas people might have in regard to XMPP integration with Drupal.

Cheers,
Max Khitrov
======================================================
======================================================

Everybody who is interested
robertDouglass - March 5, 2007 - 08:49

Everybody who is interested in working on this should submit an application. We're looking forward to reading yours. Please make sure and review these guidelines: http://drupal.org/node/59037

- Robert Douglass

-----
Lullabot | my Drupal book
======================================================
======================================================

Question about the proposal
VokinLoksar - March 12, 2007 - 20:10

Robert,

I'm in the process of writing my proposal for this project, but I wanted to ask you, or anyone else who would be reading these, about the sort of content you are expecting (beyond what is required, of course).

Currently my proposal is about seven pages long, as I've tried to include details about XMPP (parts directly related to this project), the benefits and disadvantages of various possible solutions, and of course, how I would ideally like to approach this problem in contrast to those. It occurs to me, however, that if you guys are going to be reading over a few hundred of these, you probably aren't looking for a book. So my question is exactly how much technical information are you looking for in a proposal of this type? If all you want is just a general overview of what I'd like to create without any background or really technical things, I'd be happy to scale things down a bit. I have looked through some of the past applications, but after doing a bit of research for this project I think it might be difficult to understand the logic behind some of my design decisions if you are not very familiar with XMPP.

If you are looking for anything definite, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll put the essentials at the top and anything extra towards the end. That way it’s there if you’re interested.

- Max
======================================================
======================================================

The inverse way...
uira - March 21, 2007 - 08:45

(sorry my poor english)

And the inverse way? about apply commands in drupal from your instant messenger, like the recent launched imified (http://www.imified.com/). Whit this, we can make a lot off commands to really administer a drupal site from an IM client. And more, we able to the possibilities to make another intra communicative drupal protocol (communication off two or more drupal sites, today I know these is possible with xmlRPC) with jabber.

I just don't know if this is out off scope off this propose.
======================================================
======================================================

Yep... :)
VokinLoksar - March 21, 2007 - 12:30

This was part of my proposal, but the initial goal is to have the Drupal to user communications working first. From there, I think this is the next step.
======================================================
======================================================