[Mailman-Developers] Javascript Client for Mailman

[Ana Badescu]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 4:05 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>
wrote:

> Florian Fuchs writes:
> If you want to go in that
> direction, you'd have to address the question "why does this
> application want to (mostly) run disconnected?"
>

The Javascript client is actually a node.js module, and users will be able
to use it as part of a node.js application which just as Postorious, is
server-side. I'd like it *to not* run disconnected, but that would mean
Postorious (a Django app) would have to be able to use a node.js module,
which isn't possible at the moment :).

I understand what Florian is saying and I don't disagree, but let me
> offer an alternative perspective for discussion.  Build the small
> app's UI first, and use that as a testbed use case for the javascript
> side API that you're building.  APIs need use cases (consider how
> TCP/IP "rough consensus and running code" beat OSI's "a priori design
> and engineering" for internetworking).  I don't know that this is a
> practical approach.  Just sayin'.


Bingo! That's what I was also thinking. However, we can set up proper test
cases for each API, in Javascript as well. There is a large number of
testing strategy modules that offer everything to set up a testing
environment, stubs, mocks.
I was also thinking how some university colleagues have begun a startup and
they're offering an API to developers and they've already built API clients
for a few web frameworks/languages. As part of their "marketing strategy"
they're building proof of concept apps to showcase how the API clients are
used and how their API is consumed.

I do agree with Florian, this would be a small fun project, *after the
client is finished*, during what's left of or after the summer.


Cheers,
Ana