RSSBus – sounds like a really interesting idea

Take a look at this PDF it describes a really simple integration bus – rssbus – that is based on the RSS protocol.  It allows you to RSS enable applications and databases and use RSS to subscribe to events that these applications then publish.  There are a set of reusable modules that provide useful services as well.  The white paper is refreshing because it clearly positions the bus as a simple solution for businesses that want to get things done rather than agonise over architectural elegance, strategy, standards compliance etc, here are a few of my favourite quotes:

With RSSBus, our goal is to offer a simple, easy alternative for the small organization with
little to no IT assets, little to no professional development tools, and no professional
programmers to use them.
If you spend much of your working day developing web services for one of the major
service platforms, and you can no longer write a single sentence without a four, five, or
six letter acronym in it, perhaps you should stop reading right here and spare yourself the
disappointment.

And if your job title has “Architect” or “Enterprise” in it, then please  stop reading here. 
Just in case you didn’t notice, we said Service Bus, and not Enterprise Service Bus.  In
fact, this is the last time we will mention Enterprise.

What we are building is something different, a service platform for the rest of us, the non-
acronym-speaking crowd.  If you have bits of pieces of data that you would like to quickly
exchange with and/or connect to other systems, if simplicity and ease of use is your most
important consideration, please read on.

Check out the list of pre-built modules and you will get a feel for the sort of application events that the developers expect RSS bus to act upon:

Here is an alphabetical list of some of the modules included in the product:
AmazonOps: operations that provide access to Amazon services.
BusOps: core Bus operations (feeds, caching, meta information).
CcOps: operations for credit card authorization and processing.
EbayOps: operations that provide access to EBay services.
FedexOps: operations for FedEx shipping and tracking.
FeedOps: operations for managing RSS feeds.
FileOps: operations for managing files and directories.
FtpOps: operations for transferring files to and from FTP servers.
GoogleOps: operations that provide access to Google services.
ImapOps: operations for receiving email messages from IMAP servers.
LdapOps: operations for connecting to LDAP directories
MediaOps: operations that provide information about digital media files.
OfxOps: operations for accessing bank accounts and financial services.
PaypalOps: operations that provide access to PayPal payment services.
PopOps: operations for receiving email messages from POP servers.
QbOps: operations that provide access to Intuit’s QuickBooks.
SearchOps: operations for searching and indexing.
SmsOps: operations for sending SMS text messages.
SmtpOps: operations for sending SMTP email.
SqlOps: operations for connecting to SQL databases.
LdapOps: operations for connecting to LDAP directories.
MediaOps: operations that provide information about digital media files.
OfxOps: operations for accessing bank accounts and financial services.
PaypalOps: operations that provide access to PayPal payment services.
PopOps: operations for receiving email messages from POP servers.
QbOps: operations that provide access to Intuit’s QuickBooks.
SearchOps: operations for searching and indexing.
SmsOps: operations for sending SMS text messages.
SmtpOps: operations for sending SMTP email.
SqlOps: operations for connecting to SQL databases. 

It’s not difficult to see that this solution is going to appeal to people who have grown up with the web, who love REST and Mashups etc, and it’s simplicity could well serve as an inspiration to many big EAI solution providers as well.