The primary issue was the need to perform filtering for every message on every client due to the use of broadcasts for messaging. One way to avoid this is to use a pub/sub messaging system instead. A number of people that I respect have been using the MQTT Protocol so I thought I'd take a better look at it.

I figured a good way to understand it would be to implement it. I've implemented several protocols from scratch without any documentation so implementing MQTT from a well-written specification was simple process. The basic implementation took less than a week and resulted in Net::MQTT and AnyEvent::MQTT on CPAN.

The protocol is lightweight and flexible. This is great. It works well in contexts where you are both publisher and subscriber because you can design the simplest, minimal messaging format between agents.

However, building communities that can write components that can interoperate will require some more structure. For example, using xPL, I have a client that monitors messages using the "sensor.basic" schema and creates/updates round robin database files for each sensor reading. This works for all xPL clients that support the "sensor.basic" schema regardless of developer/platform/etc. Another good example of this kind of protocol layering is XMPP and the XMPP Extension Protocols.

Essentially what is required to make this work is an ontology - a specification for topic usage and semantics. I have no idea how to produce such a suitable ontology but I plan to think about it some more. I'll probably draw ideas from various existing sources such as xPL Message Schema, xAP Message Schema, Pachube feed definitions, etc.

If anyone has any ideas (is it a good idea, how to proceed, etc?) then I'd love to hear about them.