Pub/Sub vs. Atom & AtomPub?

I came across an interesting article by Sean McGrath entitled I'll push and you pull. The mashup approach to application integration.

I posted about Push vs. Pull in the spring. I'm a sucker for Lean thinking so the title of this article got my attention.

Sean says:

Now here is the kicker. The web - with all its concomitant bits'n'bobs from XML to RSS/Atom to AJAX - is an extremely good platform for pull-centric design. On the Web, if you try to pull some piece of information and something goes wrong, well you just pull again and again until you get it or give up. Nothing fancy. Just brutish repetition. Something machines are extremely good at. If you want to look at information from yesterday, you just go to the URL that contains yesterday's information. Nothing fancy. Just a simple naming convention that includes dates in URLs.

I have done a fair amount with pub/sub over the years (complete with clustering etc., fail over strategies, etc.). I like it, but it is not without it's challenges. If only there was real guaranteed delivery etc. If only there wasn't "flow control". If only fail over always worked. If only messages didn't get trapped, etc. All I'm saying is having implemented several large implementations of pub/sub (EDA whatever you like), I know that it isn't easy - that nothing is really "guaranteed".

Clearly Atom can't replace ALL pub/sub use cases, but for every day integration architecture where you want business events / EDA why can't we use Atom feeds? In an extreme case, you might have an event sink requesting the feed every 10 seconds - in most cases every 10 minutes would likely be fine?

Who is doing this today? Any lessons from the trenches?

Update I meant to read the article earlier linked off of this post by James Snell. Just did. Dang. It is a sample of using Apache Abdera.

Update 20-AUG Bill de hÓra has a pretty $$ response - thanks Bill.

Update 21-AUG Dan Creswell has some thoughtful comments. When I blog I often do the x vs. y thing - but clearly the truth is in the middle. I used to be a push bigot and have just learn the hard way how difficult it is to achieve. Clearly, not everything can be pull - of course it is a mix. In case anyone is curios, I'm thinking of inter-domain integration (e.g., getting customer additions/updates/deletions to many interested systems) with this line of thinking rather than some sort of intra-domain integration (e.g., trading system where there is massive high performance pub/sub). You have to choose the right tool for the job. More and more for me, simplicity is winning out. This is just an evolution of my thinking - a year ago I was still a MOM bigot.