Re: rss again and syncing data

Ken Foskey:

> I have a new job (really cool) in sport (ok I am not a sport geek) but the
> discussion about rss feeds made me think...
> 
> I have to keep stats between games synced up from a central serve
> efficiently. I was thinking that the RSS feed would be the perfect tool
> for this. Keep the game stats in an XML file that gets updated and then
> update the RSS feed with the new timestamp.
> 
> Is this the general idea?

It depends on how complex your synchronisation requirements are. If it's
just a matter of one system regularly conveying information and another
system (or systems, which is usually the case) regularly consuming it, then
a feed is a simple interface to use, for which many producer and consumer
implementations exist.

If you have multiple systems conveying information, you might have to start
thinking about synchronisation issues. This is why Microsoft came up with
the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE), which underpin a bunch of their Live
Mesh excretion.

Also, completely ignore everything that has ever been written about RSS and
use Atom. It is actually community-developed and self-consistent enough to
be useful for Real World (particularly data-oriented) applications.

  http://www.atomenabled.org/

- ii

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