[FOSS-GPS] Tango/Foxtrot GPS - Plotting locations of multiple things

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Thu Apr 28 14:34:40 EDT 2011


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Joshua Judson Rosen" <rozzin at geekspace.com>

> As Jay said, "Replace the proprietary `friends' and IM subsystems
> with open, standards-based [and decentralised] systems" is indeed
> on the roadmap <http://www.foxtrotgps.org/roadmap.html>.
> 
> I'd love to see what you're doing. If you go through the archive
> for this mailing-list, you'll find some conversation about protocol
> and API options that we've looked into. I'm still thinking that
> Jabber/XMPP looks pretty favourable; and, actually, contrary
> to what I said the last time I wrote on this topic...,
> I think doing XEP-0080 via Pub-Sub actualy should be viable--
> I believe we can use MUC chatrooms as a sort of `public roster'
> and then use Pub-Sub for sending/receiving geolocation updates.
> 
> Though, if you've already got something working with a different
> protocol..., maybe we should just use that? ;)

This is where I stick my head up out of the cube again.

"Get The Glue Right."

That's my number 1 design principle (stolen from, I dunno who, though
I'm sure the phrasing's original to me).  The better job you do framing
the protocol against already available facilities, the more useful
the end product will be, and the larger its potential audience.

While I'm not as familiar with XMPP related stuff as I'd like to be,
several thoughts occur to me here:

Something shaped like a 'chatroom', but only populated with location-
servents seems a good implementation; the servent listens for everyone
else's reports and plots them, and sends its own.

Whether it actually sends one, and whether it fuzzes the position or not, 
are administrative questions regarding the confederation rather than
technical ones, but useful things to consider regardless.

In other news: remember that an end user may want to be part of multiple
confederations simultaneously... and that different confederations may want
to utilize different transport: it's not unreasonable to envision 
implementing this atop IRC, for example.  Or, of course, atop CDMA/RF; 
the canonical example of that being something like an ambulance service
or ATC Mode S.

Just some thoughts to keep in mind when factoring the code into layers.

Cheers,
-- jra


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