As I've been mulling over the uses of XML, I hit upon an idea that's a bit of an extension of the bboard concept Adam proposed.
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Imagine if a group of people in distributed offices were waiting on Widget-A of info that was assigned to Guy in Office A. Offices B, C and D are all waiting on that widget and need to know the <i>instant</i> Guy has received, processed and posted it to the DB. I imagine, by extrapolation of the comments in this thread, that this functionality could be done no prob with Jabber.
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The big question for me is how agnostic can the system be to the widget and it's place in the DB? In other words, given that Jabber is built with XML, can I generate and place tags in the system so that I'm notified when someone changes <i>any</i> piece of info in? Can I do it with limited knowledge of the system, appropriate but not total permission and to my heart's content?
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In other words, if I'm Gal in Office E, can I choose, at any time, to stick a tag on Widget-B to find out when Guy has worked it out?
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Also, it seems for system administration purposes, Jabber could take the place of Cassandracle (or whatever the those apps are called). Imagine if AdminDude can create and stick a tag somewhere in the system to find out how the server is doing, to drop him a note when it hits a certain number hits, when the DB has done a certain number of processes, etc. all without having to get into the guts of the code. It could potentially create some helpful abstraction.
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It seems to me that this kind of functionality, not really IM, would really be something new and a big win for the system. It would "speed up" collaboration because it would make the system that much more transparent. Also, if we could really use XML the way I'm imagining it, there are probably hundreds of other applications as well.
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I definitely don't understand how XML is defined and used, so i guess the big question I have is: Am I making sense?
