[Sigia-l] Notification schema?

[Listera]

"Beau Lebens" wrote:

> RSS would be an option, but it would require the users end to interact with
> your system somehow,

Interesting. 

What exactly do you do to get email? Does it happen telepathically or do you
click the equivalent of a "Receive Mail" button on your email client? Or do
you set up a schedule?

Guess what? RSS works the same way. As I explained previously, you can
manually click the equivalent of a "Get RSS" button or schedule your RSS
reader/client to automatically check every XX minutes. Just like your email
client.

So unless you're using a true, real-time "push/broadcast" system (and for
email you most probably are not), there's no difference here.

> whereas it is often a lot easier and more robust

How so?

> to just build into your backend (depending on how you are building everything)
> a system which just periodically checks the database for any 'events' which
> need to occur, then acts them out and emails the required people.

One of the advantages of RSS over email is that you don't need to manage
email accounts: you don't need to deal with undelivered mail, sub/unsub,
spam protectors, address changes, bounces, "I'm not at the office"
reminders, multiple-access requirements, etc. Users get the feeds wherever
and whenever they want.

You can even design attractive and very lightweight HTML/XML based webpages,
customized for each kind of user, that automatically gather appropriate RSS
feeds, perhaps combine them in interesting ways, like an info portal, which
incidentally, you can trivially code to automatically poll for new data
every XX minutes.

Email is great (and has some advantages) but the future of "easy and robust"
architecture for change notification is in fact RSS, which was specifically
designed for it.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba