Spark Sessions: FeedSync, Steven Leeds, Microsoft
Thursday, April 24th, 2008Steven is our speaker for our last Spark Session of the academic year. Feedsync is an Open Spec for Synchronization through Atom and RSS.
His team is connected to Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.
Feedsync was called simple file sharing for RSS. Oh, also Microsoft announced a new service recently, called Live Mesh and it has FeedSync baked in deep. (ugh, I hate that term, but it works.)
With feedsync the data is multi-master meaning it can come from and go to anywhere. All endpoints get the same result, eventually. As he points out, if I shut my laptop lid for two weeks it will be out of sync, but when I open up, the machine will sync to RSS feed.
It is protocol independent, lightweight, extensible and preserves conflicting data. which means that it doesn’t just keep the last one, or a merged version, but saves all version. They are hoping there will be creative Commons and Microsoft Open Specification Promise.
What are other ways to sync? iTunes to Ipod, Phone/PDA to PC, rsync and some of the new ways (sugarsync, dropbox, etc) are some examples of point to point syncing.
In the xml, some of the new tags, focus on giving it a unique id. URNs or other methods are ok. There is also sync metadata there too. there is also some history tags to differentiate who did what when and on what device, so that you can tell the update you did on your phone with the one you did on your laptop.
feedSync is not domain specific, meaning it works with email, music, web pages, voice data, etc. For example you can update your calendar from an evite or update the evite from your calendar. FeedSync takes care of the communication between the two services.
Here’s the audio recording for this first part of the talk. (length = 21:26)
He gives a demonstration where he adds a note with some to-do items on one laptop back at his desk via VPN and then goes the to laptop here at the podium, signs in to the service, and the notes app has his notes from the remote machine. When there is a conflict in editing, the notes gives you an alert.
they have examples that work in python, and .net.
For a real life example, he is talking about a project with a NGO in Afghanistan. The group needed to get information from office to office but the infrastructure in the country is minimal and slow. So the keep their data in MS Access files, and sync the data via a server connected by satellites. they figured out a way to send access databases via SMS. Who’d a thunk?
Here’s the audio recording for this second part of the talk. (length = 37:57)
Now he’s talking about Live Mesh, a technology preview announced by Microsoft, with a capacity 10,000 users who signed up for the service in the initial 2 hours that it was available.
Live Mesh is like a central station or desktop in the cloud. you connect all your devices to this desktop in the cloud. One Application is Live Folders, a shared folder across all your machines.
Here’s the audio recording for the last part of the talk. (length = 20:08)
Here are his slides: