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Perhaps I misunderstand you, but "protocol agnostic" is a red flag to me. SOAP was designed to be protocol agnostic (there were specs for SOAP-over-SMTP and XMP
by neilk 16y ago
Perhaps I misunderstand you, but "protocol agnostic" is a red flag to me. SOAP was designed to be protocol agnostic (there were specs for SOAP-over-SMTP and XMPP and so on and so on) and look how that turned out.
As the OP points out, protocol cannot be truly decoupled from architecture, especially when it comes to things like routing. There's a huge difference between a Twitter-like @user, an SMTP-like user@domain, a URL-based system like OpenID, etc.
- michaelchisari 16y agoThere's always a trade off for just how agnostic you can be, so there's no way to support every possibility. But if you look at the different federated social web projects, there are clear similarities between them (ie, identity is in a username@domain format), so you can easily build around those similarities. For instance, building around events ("posting a status update", "sending a friend request", "verifying an identity") and abstracting out those events into hooks is how Appleseed does it. I have no misconceptions that this will hold up to every possible social protocol, past, present and future, but thinking about the protocol as an abstraction, and building the platform out from there, has already shown itself to be very useful.