A new breed of middleware vendors brought pub/sub messaging down to the desktop. With Kenamea and KnowNow, you can subscribe a spreadsheet cell to a topic that's managed out in the cloud. An event published to that topic -- such as an inventory update -- automatically updates the spreadsheet. It's true that you could do this kind of thing a decade ago, using NetDDE (Network Dynamic Data Exchange) on your Windows for Workgroups LAN. But pub/sub at Internet scale is far more compelling. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/01/29.html#a584