Hello, PubSubHubbub...anybody out there?

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John Anderson

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May 30, 2014, 11:18:39 AM5/30/14
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There's not been a lot of recent activity on this community list, or even on the PubSubHubbub feed (on SuperFeedr). Who's actively participating in PuSH these days?

I've been exploring the spec and commented on a couple Protocol issues:
https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/issues/detail?id=148
and
https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/issues/detail?id=149

I kinda expected at least a brief acknowledgement that someone will look at those. Should I expect to wait a while? (I know you're all probably busy with "real" jobs and such.)
Thanks!
JSA

Julien Genestoux

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May 30, 2014, 12:06:33 PM5/30/14
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John, 

Not all activity is conversations :)
Recently, Medium, for example started supporting PubSubHubbub (through Superfeedr!)

Now, though, I'm not sure the Google Group is the best place to report protocol issues. You should try Github :) https://github.com/pubsubhubbub/PubSubHubbub/issues?direction=desc&sort=created&state=open

Now, for issue " Subscription Validation and Verification of Intent should use POST".
This has been pondered in the past, but technically the hub is not sending any data to the subscriber, but rather asking something, which is why the GET request seems more appropriate in the REST terminology. In the end, the benefit of using GET is also that we have different logic between verifications of intent and notifications, which is a nice feature and makes it easier to implement subscribers!
The scenario that you describe, where the subscriber changes the state of the subscriber on its end is one possible implementation... others (like Superfeedr) actually "persist" the subscription when we issue the subscription request. We mark it as "verified" when the verification of intent (but that does not change the behavior), and we later mark it as "functional" when we get a notification on that callback. This helps us quickly identify how "broken" a given notification can be.

Then, for issue "Specific content-type for Subscription Request".
The Content-Type of the subscription request applies to the supplied body of the POST request, not to the content of the hub.topic. So, unless you provide a BODY that's in a different format, you *have to* use "application/x-www-form-urlencoded".
That being said, we could very well imagine that the subscription request BODY is a JSON document, like {hub: {mode: 'subscribe', topic: '...', callback:'...', verify: 'sync'}}. If that was the case, the subscriber would need to use "application/json" as the Content-Type.
What you describe with application/pubsubhubbub+xml is certainly possible, but I don't see the need for it (it adds complexity because most HTTP libraries provide all the syntactic sugar to send "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" POST requests.
You also seem to have missed that PubSubHubbub 0.4 is now agnostic in terms of Conten-Type, so it would be rather odd to go back to a time where PubSubHubbub only speaks XML :/

I hope all this helps!

Julien

 





 




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Mathieu Robin

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May 31, 2014, 2:46:13 AM5/31/14
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Hi John,

So to answer you initial question, yes we (the eng team working on the Google hub) are still out there. And that's even part of our "real" job :) We'll keep an eye on new issues from now on, unfortunately email notifications were disabled and the issues you posted went unnoticed.

Julien already addressed your comments. Going forward, I'm also not sure where protocol discussions should take place. Any reason to move these to Github?

Thanks,
Mathieu

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Mathieu Robin
Tech Lead Manager, Google Switzerland GmbH
+41 78 696 27 04
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Mathieu Robin
Tech Lead Manager, Google Switzerland GmbH
+41 78 696 27 04

Julien Genestoux

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Jun 2, 2014, 3:55:59 AM6/2/14
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Mathieu,

Thanks for jumping in the discussion...
The main reason that we picked a couple months ago was that to many people PubSubHubbub was "a Google thing", and that's bad when Google have been publicly divesting from RSS/Atom feeds in general. So, by moving away from Google properties, we could show that PubSubHubbub was not linked to Google more than to any other participant in this ecosystem.

Addtionnaly, I have to say that the Github interface is much much much friendlier than the Google Code stuff!

Thanks,



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