I am interested though in hearing about how this kind of inter-application communication could evolve into a more well-defined protocol. REST has become a fair

I am interested though in hearing about how this kind of inter-application communication could evolve into a more well-defined protocol. REST has become a fairly well defined way for applications to communicate, but it's pretty much geared toward a request/response model. What's being described here is more of a pub/sub pattern, but to my knowledge there are not any agreed upon standards that publishers can/should use to format event messages and identify objects. It reminds me a bit of the atom activity stream spec actually, which is really for publishing event streams for "social" objects: http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/atom-activity-01.html http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/atom-activity-01.html I don't know, I think it would be interesting to see something evolve that was more generalized for application communications.