This morning I sat in a couple of sessions focussed on XMPP, Jabber: Social Software for Robots & Jaiku - rich presence. While Ralph’s overview of Jaiku and the way it can exploit XMPP’s notion of presence was interesting, Kellan & Blaine’s really caught my attention. They talked about how Flickr & Twitter are using asynchronous message passing with Jabber to help decouple the components in their systems as they tackle their very well documented scaling issues.
A lot of my day to day is concerned with enabling our own platform to scale out effectively, and one of the emergent features I’m seeing is exactly this - by relaxing the constraint of synchroncity you can make great savings during development, deployment and at runtime.
Of course, as with everything there are downsides to this approach and trade offs to be made but its always nice validation to see people taking similar steps to us.
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