Hello all,
I'm new to the list, so I'll introduce myself briefly. I'm located in Warsaw, Poland. I have been using free software for more that 10 years, I have been a member of several OS projects including Jakarta Turbine and MaxQ, occasional contributor in several others. I have also established a few OS projects in the course of my company operations. (see http://objectledge.org/related-projects.html). I work full time as Java/J2EE developer full time for 5+ years now. I don't know much Python yet but I'm a quick learner ;-). I happen to also be the sysadmin in my company and I have experience working with Mailman as list & site administrator.
On to the business :-)
We (http://caltha.pl) are currently developing a Java-powered WWW application for group collaboration (http://cyklotron2.cyklotron.org). The application includes (among others) discussion forums. We are looking for possibilities of enhancing the forums is such way that users could interact with them using e-mail in addition to the web-based interface. Messages posted to the forum using e-mail should be displayed along those entered through the web interface, with appropriate threading, and users should be able to receive all messages in their mailbox possibly ignoring the web interface completely. At the same time we would like to perform all administrative activities through the web interface provided by our application including moderation of subscription requests, and moderation of individual messages.
We are fully aware of the magnitude of complexity of the mailing list software, so it was natural to look for software that is already available. Mailman was the obvious choice because of it's maturity, features and the fact that we have experience in using it.
As we looked for ways of integrating Mailman with our application written in Java, we thought about running first thought Mailman code under jython, when this turned out to be impossible, we thought about running scripts from $MAILMAN_HOME/bin as external processes spawned by Java VM + writing custom glue scripts in Python invoking parts of Mailman codebase. This solution has the obvious disadvantage of starting a python interpreter and loading Mailman code to perform each operation and terminating it right afterwards. Of course startup time of Python interpreter is nothing comparing to Java VM, still it is a waste of system resources. The next idea was implementing some sort of daemon in Python that would stay in memory with all the necessary code loaded and communicated with the Java application using, say XMLRPC. And bingo! We discovered that this is already being worked on.
We are very much interested joining the effort in developing mailman-xmlrpc. At this point we'll be happy to serve as early adopters & testers (in fact we have already built the patched codebase, launched it and connected to it using an ad hoc Java based client). We also hope to start providing patches as soon as our knowledge of Python and Mailman codebase increases.
My question at this point is whether this is the appropriate list to discuss mailman-xmlrpc specific topics, or should these be taken to somewhere else perhaps a dedicated list should be created at http://savannah.nongnu.org/mail/?group=mailman-xmlrpc ?
Rafał