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April 15, 2002

I've been way too busy

I've been way too busy to blog for a while. Apologies to (both) my regular readers!
Dave Winer asks:

if anyone from Groove is tuned in. Is the new Groove in any way open? Does it support SOAP or XML-RPC or even RSS?

More ways than I can count. Groove is made of COM components, with some XML semantics to tie them together. All the key components have their APIs published and documented, in the Groove Development Kit. So you can write code in most environments (the most popular being jscript, VB and C++) which talks to these components to use Groove services - instant messaging, awareness, firewall-transparent secure communications, XML storage, shared spaces, and so on. You can call into Groove services from your own application, or put your code inside Groove's environment as a tool, transceiver, or "bot".

SOAP: one of the Groove components is a SOAP client, which is used quite heavily in the product (many of the centralised Groove services such as the public user directory are implemented with SOAP), but can also be used to call SOAP services in the outside world (such as Google) - there's sample code in the GDK to do this. What you can't do easily - yet - is call up the services of a Groove client (peer) using a SOAP call. For one reason: client devices are regular PCs: they don't often have stable IP addresses, they mostly live behind firewalls, and they're offline most nights. (There are some always-on services in a Groove network, which relay Groove transactions. Wouldn't it be cool if... ahem. Some other time.)

RSS: a long time ago, when I was at Agora, I and Peter and Eilish wrote a tool to get RSS news into Groove; during my Cabezal time I did a couple of bug fixes. It still works, and several people use it. Here's a screenshot. Later I wrote another tool to publish Groove content to Web formats including, inter alia, RSS. Which is one of the formats produced by the Groovelog, a Groove instant-message-publishing application.
(Incidentally, Agora's second-ever Groove tool (an outliner) does OPML).