Apple has historically allowed a number of technologies to languish as it focuses on the most promising and profitable products to invest its resources in. That’s good news for anyone wondering if the company’s PNS (push notification services) will ever see the light of day, as the company has so much riding on it. Unlike Apple TV, iCal, and other projects that seem to have taken a long time to develop as back burner hobbies due to the lack of any real revenue stream to justify their development, Apple’s PNS is directly related to immediately profitable, high priority projects from the iPhone to MobileMe to iTunes to Snow Leopard Server.
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In Snow Leopard Sever, iCal Server is paired with a Notification Server to provide push calendar updates using XMPP’s publish-subscribe specification. Also known as pubsub, the service works like a “push RSS feed,” so rather than polling an RSS file on a server to discover new updates, the Notification Server pushes out just what’s changed to all of the clients who have subscribed to the update system (and who have been authenticated to receive updates). In some respects, the Notification Server is like a secured Twitter feed, with iCal server sending tweets to listening iCal clients to keep them abreast of changes.
A little birdie has told me this indeed true… that Apple’s push notification system will arrive with 10.6 Server; that the notification system itself requires Snow Leopard Server.
Anyone want to put some money down on this? I need to buy a car.