PubSub Sandbox

We’ve updated the ping server to actually send out UTF-8 characters instead of using xml entity escaping for those characters. This may make it slightly more difficult to test from telnet, but (as several people pointed out) it’s the correct thing to do.

After that, we still need to escape a couple of characters in attribute values: &, <, > and ". We escape these using xml entity codes. All in all it should be a lot cleaner. We’ve been running a test program against it for about 10,000 records (30 minutes) with no discernible errors.

Thanks to Ben Hyde for the note, and for the testing.

If you’d like to try it out, connect to sandbox.pubsub.com on port 9999. There’s a handy test program on blo.gs if you’ve got php5/cli.

(This is old information, cobbled from the old sandbox pages. I’m backdating the post so it goes to the end).

PubSub’s ping code is designed to implement a high-performance, robust and stable XML-RPC ping system in the manner of blo.gs or weblogs.com.

At the moment, there’s an apache 1.3 module that can handle inbound pings; a second process that does something useful with the pings as they arrive; a ping server that pushes pings back out to interested clients; and an application that connects to the ping server and generates changes.xml-style files.

The apache module itself is placed under the Apache license; see the source file for more information. The sample file for reading from messages queues can be used for any purpose; it’s really just for illustration. The rest of the code falls under various open-source licenses, have a look at the source files for more information.

The source code for the projects on this page (look to the right) contains install and configuration information. If you try them out, please send feedback to feedback@pubsub.com, or just post comments on this message.