Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google App Engine: A roadmap update! Receiving e-mail, background tasks and XMPP. I predict a bunch of sites will start building small parts of their overall functionality on App Engine when some of these features land (much easier than hosting your own custom XMPP server).

# 9th February 2009, 7 pm / appengine, cloud-computing, email, google, python, xmpp

View your FriendFeed in real-time. FriendFeed become the latest site to enable real-time updates using the long-polling variant of Comet. The real-time Web was something of a theme at this year’s FOWA, with talks on message queues, XMPP and scaling Comet at Meebo.

# 16th October 2008, 2:06 pm / comet, fowa2008, friendfeed, meebo, realtimeweb, xmpp

Quick OAuth Notes. Yesterday’s XMPP Summit resulted in a proposed standard for using OAuth to authenticate XMPP streams.

# 23rd July 2008, 6:14 pm / oauth, xmpp

Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks. The HTML5 spec now includes WebSocket, a TCP-style persistent socket mechanism between client and server using an HTTP handshake to work around firewalls. The Orbited comet implementation provides a WebSocket compatible API to existing browsers today, and can also act as a firewall/proxy between WebSocket and regular TCP sockets, allowing browsers to talk to things like XMPP servers using Orbited to bridge the gap.

# 4th July 2008, 9:54 am / comet, html5, orbited, sockets, tcpsocket, websockets, xmpp

XMPP OpenID server. An OpenID provider that sends you a Jabber message when you try to log in, to help guard against phishing.

# 20th January 2007, 11:24 pm / openid, phishing, xmpp