RFC: UNS (Unified Notification Stream) v1.0 need, requirements & implementation details

[prakashchokalingam]

What is UNS?

UNS is an enhanced alternative for RSS stands for Unified Notification Stream, which helps to collect updates, notifications & alerts across different products & services in real-time.

Why?

• RSS is dead.
• UNS is real-time & uses JSON, hence UNS notifications can support rich functionalities with configurations
• UNS feeds support reactions & discussions
• UNS supports grouped notifications
• UNS supports user scoped notifications, hence a product/service need not to build its custom notification system they can simply rely on UNS (not available for community version)
• UNS supports rich components (not available for community version)
• UNS provides rich APIs & SDKs to publish and integrate
• UNS is secure & verified.

Workflow

Providers

Channels

• Product or Service which is going to use UNS to push updates needs to register their channel with UNS HQ to get the channel identity token.
• Once a channel is created it is publically available for the end-users to subscribe.
• 'n' number Channels can be created & managed at the UNS HQ web app

Public notifications

• Once Registered with the channel identity token providers can start publishing updates via SDKs or APIs
• Providers can auto subscribe/unsubscribe users into their channel
• By default all notifications will have reactions & discussions, providers can opt to turn them off.
• Once a user unsubscribed by a channel, they cannot rejoin unless a channel manager added the user back to the channel

Private notifications (Not available for community version)

• For private notifications, providers need to get a channel based user identity token (unique per channel) from UNS, with the user identity token they can start publishing private updates.

Rich components (Not available for community version & v1.0 release)

• Along with notifications, a few rich components can also be configured and sent to the end-users like polls, feedback and more.

Consumers

• With UNS reader (UNS HQ Web App / Chrome addon / Desktop App / Mobile APP & SDKs) if a user subscribed to the channel, end users can get the updates in real-time.
• Users can opt to subscribe/unsubscribe to a channel via the above reader's app.
• Once a user unsubscribed from a channel, they cannot be added back to the channel by the channel manager.

General

• UNS socket is open to all, any consumer app can connect to the socket and listen for notification feeds. They can listen to all channels or to a specific channel for public feeds.
• For private notification feeds consumer apps have to get the user token with user consent (not available @v1.0 release)

Required Apps

• A core app which takes care of channel, user & notification management (GO lang)
• Realtime socket app which takes care of pushing events to appropriate channels along with Kafka stream (GO lang)
• UNS reader for all devices (Flutter)

[tharakai]

Awaiting UNS, a great alternative to RSS with some promising features.