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

[Ben Sims]

Many thanks for your speedy response,

Apologies for any ignorance displayed regarding Mailman - I have begun experimenting with it only recently as a way to add mailing list functionality to the existing PHP application I mentioned. (As a side note, a big thank you to whoever builds the Debian package - completely painless, especially compared with Sympa...)

With regards to Mailman 3, from my reading I understand that this will implement SQL-type storage for all configuration and list data. This would completely take care of my needs in this case I think; would you perhaps be able to give us a rough idea of progress?

As a garden-variety PHP developer and Mailman rookie, I doubt how far I am capable of going deep into Mailman itself to implement a solution for this. I would be happy to do the research before dismissing the idea though, if you could point me in the direction of some bedtime reading on the subject. Given the time I have available and the limited functionality required, I'm very much leaning towards the cheapest hack option - which seems likely to be simply executing command line commands.

Regarding your questions:

-- What functionality do you want to expose?

Not much. To start with, creating and removing lists and adding and deleting subscribers would probably be enough.

-- How would you handle security?

To be honest, I hadn't even got as far as thinking about that, since I'm not really clear on the mechanisms involved.

- - Will you have to re-implement much of the CGI logic?

Again, I haven't gone through closely enough to give a decent answer. If I was hacking something up which did use the Web Interface as a gateway, I would be more likely to use Mechanize to fake a browser and do the intereacting. Ugly I know, but I'm familiar with that so I could get it to work.

Sorry that I don't have the experience to come up with better ideas on this; as I said, I welcome input from anybody that has already attempted this kind of work.

Regards,
Benjamin



----- Original Message ----
From: Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org>
To: Ben Sims <benjaminsims at yahoo.com>
Cc: mailman-developers at python.org
Sent: Wednesday, 16 May, 2007 4:05:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] Interacting with mailman remotely through APIs / wrappers

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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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