[Mailman-Developers] XMLRPC interface

[Rafal Krzewski]

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