[Mailman-Developers] Interacting with mailman remotely through APIs / wrappers

[Barry Warsaw]

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On May 16, 2007, at 5:00 AM, Ben Sims wrote:

> All
> of these are rather clunky. My dream response would be some sort of  
> Web
> service / API interface with a corresponding PHP client object, but I
> haven't been able to find any evidence of this existing.

I think this could be handled fairly easily, and it would make an  
excellent project for Mailman 3.  You could prototype the work for  
Mailman 2.1 fairly easily too.

The way I'd go about thinking about this would be to implement a  
qrunner based on Python's standard SimpleXMLRPCServer module.  While  
not technically a 'queue runner', we already have some precedence in  
the trunk for running other types of long-running processes from the  
qrunner architecture, so while a slight misnomer, it's quite workable.

The questions of course are

- - What functionality do you want to expose?
- - How will you handle security?
- - Will you have to re-implement much of the CGI logic?

I think you could pretty easily throw together the architecture for  
this and then start to answer the other questions.  In Mailman 3 I'm  
trying hard to get functionality that lives only in the CGI or  
command line scripts accessible through the standard Mailman package.

One other thing to think about: In the trunk, we already have a wsgi- 
based web server which should allow sites to swap in their own HTTP- 
based access to Mailman if they wanted (e.g. via Zope, Django,  
TurboGears, etc.).  Many of these web publishing frameworks also have  
XMLRPC publishing.  I don't know what the standards there are, but  
IWBNI we could swap those publishing mechanisms as well.

- -Barry

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