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PubSubHubbub is a plug and play pubsub solution for App Engine deployment.
If you’re not even sure why you’d want pubsub over polling to begin with, the PubSubHubbub wiki has a page on Why Polling Sucks:
What’s wrong with feed updates every few minutes/hours/days?
It might be fine for reading your blogs (it’s obviously been fine for most people for years now), but it’s not fast enough for the decentralized applications of tomorrow that people want to build.
We and others are thinking about totally decentralized social networking, with real-time updates. Don’t assume any of this is about blogs just because we’re using the Atom format and Atom’s typically used for blog posts.
Atom feeds can be used to represent any topics, including private person-to-person topics such as direct messages or even real-time moves in a game.
Whether it’s for moves in a real-time game, livestreaming video, or remixing music, the common use cases of Atom and RSS and JSON and APIs and HTTP are quickly taking on a new light as polling gives way to pubsub.
In fact, if pubsub truly can fulfill the promise of 500ms or less latency, it would be a genuine Omega Point, as big a game changer as the RDBMS or the GUI.