Next PubSub User Group meeting: Monday, August 25 at 6pm in Palo Alto.

We will hold our next PubSub User Group meeting on
Monday, August 25 at 6pm in Palo Alto.

Meet at the Palo Alto Three Seasons restaurant located
at 518 Bryant Street between Hamilton and University
in the side alley off Bryant Street:

   http://www.thethreeseasons.com/

Really really good Vietnamese cuisine awaits... :)

   -- Adam




P.S. -- Great post by Joyce today on the blog:

    http://www.mod-pubsub.org/blog/archives/245_Intertwingly_indeterminacy.html

Intertwingly indeterminacy

So I've been working on a little feature here, comment notification. If you subscribe to /what/blog/mod-pubsub/comments/X where X is the unique ID of a thread on this blog, you will get a ping whenever someone adds a new comment to that thread.

The main thing I've learned is how little we have yet evolved specific techniques for dealing with Internet-scale programming. For instance, if you implemented comment notifications using normal n-tier techniques, you'd save a bit in a database that represented whether a particular user wanted to get email each time a new comment was added. There wouldn't be much doubt in your mind about how to represent the relationship of your web code to a particular mail server or a particular database. Somewhere you define these resources once, and then you can just refer to them as $myMailserver and $myDatabase -- because in normal n-tier, you wouldn't use a mailserver or database that wasn't under your direct control.

But when you develop with mod-pubsub, the relationship between your web code and the resources available to it changes. You can't assume that every published event is going to the same mod-pubsub server, and you sure can't assume they'll all be controlled by the owner of the web server. You can't even assume how many different places the user will want to publish a certain piece of information. It all becomes a lot more indeterminate.

So how do you represent all this flexibility at the code level? Especially in a way that doesn't require the server owner to dig through enormous piles of code to make his or her wishes known? That's definitely going to be one of the ongoing challenges of integrating mod-pubsub into n-tier webdev. 


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email sponsored by: Free pre-built ASP.NET sites including
Data Reports, E-commerce, Portals, and Forums are available now.
Download today and enter to win an XBOX or Visual Studio .NET.
http://aspnet.click-url.com/go/psa00100003ave/direct;at.aspnet_072303_01/01