Hello all,
I've been using Mailman on our web site for open source development of"serious business software." http://www.greatbridge.org/. We are interested in seeing Mailman have a PostgreSQL database back end (and further in the future PHP front end web tools.) I have been given permission to start working on this as soon as I have completed my current project (should be done this week).
I've started to familiarize myself with the general flow of Mailman. Ihave not had a chance to get into the current data handling classes but, correct me if i'm wrong, I believe modifying the code to use a database should be fairly contained. In the process of doing this I want to do everything in a such a manner that is best for contributing back to the Mailman project.
Any feedback anyone can offer on this subject would be wonderful.Thanks in advance.
Chris Ryan chris@greatbridge.com
On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 08:32:44AM -0500, Chris Ryan wrote:
I've been using Mailman on our web site for open source development of "serious business software." http://www.greatbridge.org/. We are interested in seeing Mailman have a PostgreSQL database back end (and further in the future PHP front end web tools.) I have been given permission to start working on this as soon as I have completed my current project (should be done this week). I've started to familiarize myself with the general flow of Mailman. I have not had a chance to get into the current data handling classes but, correct me if i'm wrong, I believe modifying the code to use a database should be fairly contained. In the process of doing this I want to do everything in a such a manner that is best for contributing back to the Mailman project.
I think it would be great if you could start this up... but please consider creating the database interface in such a way that it should be easy replace it with other database engines (LDAP, mysql and anything else available in Python). If you check out the archives, this has been discussed before but as far as I know we didn't see any real results yet... Btw, if you look at the Mailman designnotes you can see that the centralizeddatabase has been planned for 3.0 ... maybe it's a good moment to start discussing it anyway.
Ricardo.
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On Wed, 21 Feb 2001 08:32:44 -0500 Chris Ryan <chris@greatbridge.com> wrote:
Hello all,
I've been using Mailman on our web site for open source development of "serious business software." http://www.greatbridge.org/. We are interested in seeing Mailman have a PostgreSQL database back end (and further in the future PHP front end web tools.) I have been given permission to start working on this as soon as I have completed my current project (should be done this week).
I've started to familiarize myself with the general flow of Mailman. I have not had a chance to get into the current data handling classes but, correct me if i'm wrong, I believe modifying the code to use a database should be fairly contained. In the process of doing this I want to do everything in a such a manner that is best for contributing back to the Mailman project.
Any feedback anyone can offer on this subject would be wonderful. Thanks in advance.
Rather than hack in postgreSQL support directly, it's probably a better idea to wrap the whole data storage system in an abstraction layer, provide a couple of standard implementations (ie pickled objects and the postgreSQL system you're looking into to) and allow people to integrate their own storage system to suit their needs. Personally I want to place Mailman's data into a ZODB so I can get seemless Zope intergration.
Zpatterns might be a good place to start, as far as a data abstraction layer goes.
http://www.zope.org/Members/pje/Wikis/ZPatterns/HomePage
John
Hi Chris.
On Wed, 21 Feb 2001 08:32:44 -0500 Chris Ryan <chris@greatbridge.com> wrote:
Hello all,
I've been using Mailman on our web site for open source development of "serious business software." http://www.greatbridge.org/. We are interested in seeing Mailman have a PostgreSQL database back end (and further in the future PHP front end web tools.) I have been given permission to start working on this as soon as I have completed my current project (should be done this week).
I think that's very cool. I've been trying to work toward that myself. I brought up Mailman on a virtfs machine (virtfs is a script package that uses chroot to create virtual servers) last month in conjunction with two websites based on PHP, PostgreSQL, and Perl. The finished product was a bear to get working, and I'm hoping to go back and replace a fair portion of it with a PHP/Postgres backend. Mailman is not very friendly to chrooted environments because the configuration information is hard-coded into so many different scripts.
My suggestion would be to use an abstraction layer similar to the one that Tim Perdue uses on SourceForge with PHP, if not the one he actually uses. Tim was able to switch SourceForge and PHPBuilder over from MySQL to Postgres pretty quickly, and I found that impressive.
I haven't begun this process yet. I'll be interested to follow what you're doing, and maybe at some point I'll be able to help out. Chuq has also mentioned working on a database backend, possibly with Apple's Enterprise Object Frameworks.
I've thought about just working my way through the scripts in the cgi-bin directory, giving them all the same names and arguments but rewriting them in PHP or Python to use Postgres instead. I hate to mix PHP with Python, but PHP does seem to work very nicely for web apps. I'd just be grateful to have it all working reliably instead of breaking every time I need to change something. I've got something going on right now that causes my webscripts to go off to lunch without leaving anything in the error log. Darn it.
I've started to familiarize myself with the general flow of Mailman. I have not had a chance to get into the current data handling classes but, correct me if i'm wrong, I believe modifying the code to use a database should be fairly contained. In the process of doing this I want to do everything in a such a manner that is best for contributing back to the Mailman project.
There's a nice list of all the PHP Postgres functions at www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pgsql.php (in about the middle of the page). I had looked at that list and thought that it made a nice start for an abstraction layer, whether written in PHP or Python.
Good luck! Dave Klingler
participants (4)
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Chris Ryan -
Dave Klingler -
John Morton -
Ricardo Kustner