By Peter Saint-Andre, IETF Internet
Draft
On the Internet today, publication of
periodically-updated resources is handled by means of standard
technologies such as HTTP, and it is not envisioned that this will
change since "The Atom Publishing Protocol"
specifies the use of HTTP for publication.
However, existing methods for learning that a resource has been
updated are currently limited to "polling" for changes via HTTP,
which is inherently inefficient. What is needed is a technology
that can be relied on to "push" information only when a resource
undergoes a state change, and only to those who are interested in
learning about such state changes. This memo describes a method for
notifying interested parties about changes in syndicated
information encapsulated in the Atom feed format, where such
notifications are delivered via an extension to the Extensible
Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for publish-subscribe
functionality.
http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-saintandre-atompub-notify-00.txt
See also Atom Publishing Format
and Protocol:
http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html