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
At 4:25 PM +0200 2006-03-29, Rafal Krzewski wrote:
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.
There is already a fair amount of information in the FAQ Wizard about integrating Mailman with web forums, and I think there may also be some information there about XMLRPC.
Before you get started doing too much work integrating Mailman into your Java environment, have you read all those entries?
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 ?
This list is where the core Mailman developers will be watching the various development related discussions, and I know that some of them are very interested in the XMLRPC stuff.
I would suggest keeping these discussions on this list until you are recommended to move them somewhere else by one of the core developers (e.g., someone like Barry, Tokio, Mark, etc...).
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755LOPSA member since December 2005. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.
Brad Knowles wrote:
There is already a fair amount of information in the FAQ Wizard about integrating Mailman with web forums, and I think there may also be some information there about XMLRPC.
I did check the FAQs throughly, and all I was able to find was that: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.026.htp
It gives some infomration about some products already integrated (to some degree) but no information how should one go about integrating Mailman with another product.
Also, no information about XMLRPC support in the FAQ - I might volunteer to add it once the patch is merged in Mailman trunk.
Before you get started doing too much work integrating Mailman intoyour Java environment, have you read all those entries?
Most of work is already done. We have Python side ready (some refactorings + extensions to J. Ginsberg & J. Tate work), and Java side of the integration is also done. Now we are working on the discussion board code. I expect this work to be complete next week - including in-house testing.
I would suggest keeping these discussions on this list until you arerecommended to move them somewhere else by one of the core developers (e.g., someone like Barry, Tokio, Mark, etc...).
Will do. Unfortunately my attempts to contact J. Ginsberg and J. Tate failed completly so far, so I'm glad I have *someone* to talk about this at last ;-)
I'll post our updated XMLRPC patch to SF bugtracker shortly.
regards, Rafał
participants (2)
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Brad Knowles -
Rafal Krzewski