Decius wrote:
] ] I always hated the fact that there was no good "push"
] ] mechanism for getting UPS shipment updates. I don't want
] ] to go to their website every hour to see where my package
] ] is. I want to be notified when it moves. Of course I
] ] immediately thought of RSS, but I couldn't find anyone
] ] who had turned the UPS data into a feed. I then decided
] ] to make it myself in ASP.NET!
]
] [ Nice. -k]

Um.. except that RSS is still not a "push" mechanism. My rss reader still sends a "GET" to the server every hour or so.

Now SQL notifications services integrated with the UPS web service...THAT would be cool. (note that sql notifications can provide notification based on various data sources and conditions to various outputs such as email, IM, MSN alerts, etc.)

...sounds like a new project to me :)

J.P.

jpstewart wrote:
] Um.. except that RSS is still not a "push" mechanism. My rss
] reader still sends a "GET" to the server every hour or so.

Well, its not really important to me how the technology works as long as I get the data without having to interact with something.

RSS in general would greatly benefit from having a push methodology, where clients could subscribe to updates and servers could send them out. Such a design would greatly reduce the amount of traffic that RSS readers generate, and would likely be adopted rapidly by site operators. No one has bothered to do it yet.

One problem is that a lot of people use the web behind nat and cannot accept inbound connections. You may want to have a daemon on the server side that would accept tcp connections from clients and leave them pinned open, with little or no traffic, until an update is ready...