Enabling the real-time web with LiveDirectory.org (an early release) | Hacker News Reader

Enabling the real-time web with LiveDirectory.org (an early release)

livedirectory.org

8 pointstcarnell6 comments

I built LiveDirectory.org as a first attempt at providing a real and practical way for anybody to publish and manage their own content so that application developers can easily build real-time, event-driven web applications.

LiveDirectory aims to implement a WebHook style system, but with a real and practical application that is designed to be used, and be useful.

LiveDirectory is currently at a very early stage of development, but I am most interested to see what the HackerNews community think of the general idea...

Isn't this PubSubHubbub, but not? What differentiates your protocol from PuSH?

Thanks for the question!

I think that PubSubHubbub is mainly for integration with feeds (RSS, ATOM etc) - correct me if I'm wrong! So the PubSubHubbub is somewhat restricted. So I would say the difference between PubSubHubbub and LiveDirectory is that with LiveDirectory the data that is passed around is JSON, which means that:

1). It can be almost limitless in its structure (using combinations of objects, arrays, string, numbers and booleans) - RSS & Atom have very fixed data structures, so if you want to represent some other data structure, for example a client list, your latest special offers or your company office addresses you're out of luck.

2). JSON data is often far easier to parse and process than XML, so the callback notifications are much more 'developer friendly'.

Thanks for clarifying your intent, but I think the original commenter is right, there seems to be little here so far that PuSH cannot do.

In fact there have been recent proposals for PuSH to gain JSON message formats (I believe superfeedr is now providing JSON data as well).

That said, there certainly seems to be room for more PuSH hubs, perhaps that is a direction you can take LiveDirectory.

References:

PubSubHubBub JSON Draft: http://martin.atkins.me.uk/specs/pubsubhubbub-json

SuperFeedr JSON: http://blog.superfeedr.com/json-pubsubhubbub-notification/

Thanks for the extra-reading, I will definately take a look at those.

However, I will add that the whole 'pubsubhubbub' thing is very unfriendly (including the silly name) for the people that would be it's most valuable users, ie the people that are generating interesting, novel and valuable online content...

...So in addition to the fact that LiveDirectory is already up and running and working with JSON as the data language, it also aims to make life as easy as possible for BOTH the content publishers AND application developers.

Actually, I see think that LiveDirectory is only an intermediate step until website generally get more 'interactive'. What would be cool is to have a standard like:

http://somewebsite.com/services.json (or services.xml)

whereby the 'services.json' file would describe what 'actions' and 'data' is available programatically ('search', 'subscribe', 'contact details', 'product catalog' etc).

ch, I really appreciate the feedback, this is exactly why I posted this on HN! Please don't think of my response as being in anyway aggressive or defensive :-)

PubSubhubbub was built to work with Feeds, but works with any type of data (including JSON obviously). Feeds are a great first step, because it's a lingua-frenca! They are ubiquituous from Craisglist to Twitter, thru Flickr to CNN.com... etc

Also PubSubHubbub is an open protocol, which means that anyone (including you!) can easily implementing it without locking themselves in a proprietary protocol.

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