Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub

Many of the bloggers have been critical of twitter's instability and of it going down frequently against heavy traffic. This has been attributed by many to the use of RoR framework, rails architecture, ruby speed, database issues, twitter api interface, and so on. One thing to note here is that all the twitter clients keep flooding the twitter server every x seconds, traditionally known as polling even though there might not be update for the twitter stream.

At OSCON 2008, Evan Henshaw-Plath and Kellan Elliott-McCrea gave an interesting presentation on using XMPP based publish-subscribe model for online data services. The title of the presentation was "Beyond REST? Building data services with XMPP PubSub".

On monday friendfeed polled flickr nearly 3 million times for 45000 users, only 6K of whom were logged in. Architectural mismatch.

The above statement is from their presentation and explains how much of resources (cpu cycles, bandwidth, etc) are being wasted because of using polling techniques. They propose that XMPP based publish-subscribe model will greatly reduce the unnecessary transactions and overhead. Twitter is already providing XMPP streams for some of the other web services.

However not many services support publish-subscribe model. RSS based polling is very prevalent as of now. Time will tell how many of the current and upcoming services will support XMPP streams. But RSS is not going to fade away anytime soon.

Keep off the grass by Karan Bajaj

Karan Bajaj is the newest entrant to the Indian author scene. His first book "Keep off the Grass" (KOTG) just released last month and has been fairly well received by the audience.

KOTG is yet another of those books whose characters and strory revolves around India's top educational institutions and in this case, IIMB. I am not sure if Karan had any inspiration for penning this book from Chatan Bhagat's first book - "Five Point Someone" which dealt with IIT life.

The story revolves around Samrat Ratan, US citizen born to immigrant Indians, Yale graduate and an investment banker in a top Manhattan financial institution who leaves everything back and travels to India and enrolls in IIMB to search for his roots. The book unravels his time at IIMB and his unraveling of India and himself. One peculiar thing about the story is the amount of substances/drugs used and consumed by the protagonists in the story which makes me wonder if IIM's indeed have such a facility or if it is just fiction.

The book is nice to read and not heavy on mind, though philosophical at times. I got the book one night and finished it by the next afternoon. I would recommend this one over Chetan's 3rd book - "3 Mistakes of My Life". The book also was a semi-finalist at Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.