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For chat and voice telecommunications, and also for data.
XMPP as a platform to synchronize software data.
This article is an abstract of a proposed system to utilize XMPP as a data storage platform to be utilized for synchronization of browser session.
XMPP is known for its extension system known as XEP.
Two decades ago, a new extension known as XEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe was created; it allows to store data, and is extensively utilized, today, for content publishing, file sharing, encryption and various of other uses.
You might not be aware of it, but you might have already made use of XEP-0060 in the past, as XMPP is unknowingly utilized by billions of people.
If you have ever sent a message in a chat system, and that mesasge was permanent until you have removed it, then you have probably utilized PubSub from XMPP.
Essentially, PubSub allows to store data, either on a dedicated PubSub service or on private PubSub service (i.e. PEP of an XMPP account).
The data can be in any form. It can be Plain Text, HTML and even Binary data.
XEP-0163: Personal Eventing Protocol
XEP-0277: Journaling Over XMPP
Since the malpractive of adding tabs to browsers, which has subsequently caused to people to neglect the habit of tidiness by overloading tabs instead of utilizing stacks of permanent bookmarks and temporary bookmarks, some have offered various of solutions, so they said, for synchronizing browser data, namely tabs.
However, most of the proposed solutions were provided by bad organizations who chose to take advantage of this new situation and violate privacy of people who have subscribed to these synchronization services.
Moreover, the solutions were provided for specific product, and there was no standard, let alone a consideration, to standartize these synchronization systems.
As a consequence of the unwillingness to standartize these synchronization systems, people who have moved from one system to the other, have suffered from loss of data, due to malformed engineering, either accidental or deliberate.
The XMPP platform, incorporated with the standartize PubSub system, has the means to offer a solution to synchronize browser data such as boomarks, history and tabs; a solution which is private by design.
Blasta, is a project which successfully demonstrates this, by utilizing XMPP as a platform to store and share annotations, and this platform of this design can be utilized also for browser history and tabs.
What does it mean for the people who manage browser porjects?
Providing synchronization functionality on top of XMPP, which is the "messaging and presence protocol", would mean new activities and a new market.
Once XMPP is utilized, it would be simple to start thriving and active communities from the people who already use XMPP to synchronize data.
XMPP can be utilized as a publishing platform (see Movim), and it has been proven to work well.
Developers of browser projects can use their own XMPP servers to provide storage services (i.e. "cloud" so called), and also offer extended pre-paid services in exchange to extended storage and special features that are related to XMPP, or to anything else that you would think of.
The original intention of the specification Atom Over XMPP was to deliver syndicated news updates, yet the very same specification has been further developed as a mean to manage discussion forums (see Libervia) and also to manage bookmarks (see Blasta), and obviously that system can be utilized as an update check system or a news system of and for the browser developers.
This is an opportunity for all of us to standartize data synchronization over browser and software that would provide data synchronization over XMPP will be subjected to more activity and publicity.
XMPP can provide the solution for data synchronization of news browsers, news readers, and any other software that there is.
Projects that are implementing synchronization of data over XMPP are expected to have a larger audience, new business opportunities and a saner community.
Projects that incorporate telecommunication connectivity with HTML parsers are subjected to consider to adopt XMPP as a mean of session synchronization.
Akregator, Alligator, Angelfish, Falkon, Konqueror (KDE)
Fin,
Schimon