consumer / receiver difference ?

[akuckartz]

Please clarify the difference between consumers and receivers.

[rhiaro]

The receiver is basically the server that has the notifications POSTed to it, whether you think of this like creating resources inside an LDP container, or an endpoint with a script that processes these requests and stores them somewhere. The receiver is also responsible for exposing the POSTed notifications for retreival by other applications.

These other applications are the consumers. They need to know 1. how to discover an Inbox from a resource (such as an article or user profile) and 2. how to fetch the contents of the Inbox, eg. to display it nicely for a human.

They can be implemented completely independently, and we anticipate consumers to be specialised and able to read certain types (vocabularies) of notifications from an Inbox for a particular purpose, not necessarily everything all the time.

Does that help? Is there a specific part of the spec right now where you think this is confusing and could be worded better?

[csarven]

I think this is sufficiently addressed in the spec at this point. If there is a particular wording that's unclear or can be improved, lets focus on that. Issue #21 also touched on this recently.