Monday, December 15, 2003

Newswire consists of a set of software components packaged as a single application. The main application functionality allows the user to subscribe to a potentially large number of publishers, and to receive (short) messages from these publishers.  The message content may range from complete articles to short descriptions with links, similar to the individual entries in RSS feeds. Currently the only UI is a windows based outlook-style client, but other cross-platform UIs are possible as the core components are portable. See the screenshots for a view of an early alpha client. "Under the covers Newswire contains a distributed state sharing engine which uses epidemic communication to synchronize with other (local) participations. It maintains information about subscriptions and up-to-date network load information from local participants and aggregates of this information from other nearby zones and some remote zones. The messages are forwarded over a soap based overlay network where the paths are dynamically maintained using the collected network statistics  to ensure a reasonable balancing of the forwarding load. The system makes extensive use of public key technology to ensure that only messages are handled from authorized publishers and that the each participant can verify the origin of a message. Most of this is over my head, but I understand the basic concept.  Wow!! I'm going to keep my eye on this one. [link via Hack the Planet] 9:49:12 PM