Re: ActivityPump API

On 20 September 2012 12:58, Evan Prodromou <evan@status.net> wrote:

>  I thought people on this list might find the new API document I wrote for
> the ActivityPump interesting:
>
> https://github.com/evanp/activitypump/blob/master/API.md
>
> It's a simple (*I* think) API that follows the patterns of Atom
> Publishing Protocol but uses Activity Streams JSON as a feed and entry
> format. (It's based on work I did on StatusNet, which has a similar API
> based on the Activity Streams Atom serialization.)
>
> tl;dr version: each user has two primary streams (represented as Activity
> Streams multi-page collections): an *outbox* that contains activities
> they've done, and an *inbox* that contains the activities of people they
> follow. To make something happen, you POST an activity to the outbox.**
>
> One side-benefit is that the inbox makes a nice endpoint for delivery of
> activities from remote servers. This serves the same purpose as
> PubSubHubbub and Salmon in the OStatus stack -- but considerably easier, I
> think. It requires Dialback authentication, however, which is a) easy but
> b) only a few weeks old.
>
> I'd love any feedback here or as a github issue. There are plenty of test
> cases in the ActivityPump repository.
>

Thanks for sharing.

I like the idea of POSTing to a a URI and it's something we're doing more
and more with the Pingback Protocol [1]

With pingback we have started with a simple message system that has 3 fields

1. to
2. from
3. message

But is extensible to almost any type messaging.

A question about the body:

{
    "verb": "follow",
    "object": {
        "id": "acct:ken@coding.example",
        "objectType": "person"
    }
}

The verb is a follow of ken, but it doesnt say who is doing the following.
Would it not be more elegant to provide both the follower and who is being
followed, in the message.  In this way you have a low coupling with
transport mechanisms.


[1] http://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/Pingback


>
> -Evan
>
>
>
>