Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaun - CRU <address@concealed>]

Kevin,

We're pleased to ear that there is a growing interest of Sympa 
communication with outside apps. You're right when you say that moving 
every data of Sympa in MySQL would allow interoperability with the 
outside, apps located on other servers, written in other languages 
(PHP,...). We also had this solution in mind a few years ago...

More recently, we've been working on providing an API to Sympa services 
using SOAP protocole. These developments have been sleeping for more 
than one year but they're now almost finilized in latest alpha version 
of Sympa. Now let me present what exactly is this SOAP interface to Sympa :
   Sympa package now includes one more daemon that is processing 
service requests (just like the web or mail daemon of Sympa) on a SOAP 
interface (XML over HTTP). Currently we've only implemented a limited 
number of features (subscribe, unsubscribe, list of lists, WHICH,...) 
but we think it could be extended to all Sympa services. With this 
architecture you can just make distant Sympa procedure calls from with 
any PHP script that has been made SOAP-enabled (which is quite simple). 
This SOAP interface is currently used in the ESUP-Portail project 
(http://www.esup-portail.org/version_gb/index_gb.html) that contact 
Sympa SOAP server from within an UPortal chanel.

Why does this SOAP-related solution provide better interoperability than 
an SQL interface ?
1/ Accessing data is not enough ; the PHP app that want to do the MLM 
job has to do it from A to Z : checking the right for the subscriber to 
unsubscribe which means evaluating Sympa's authorization scenarios, 
check the owner reception mode, the subscriber reception mode, send the 
right 'bye.tpl' according to the list config, to the user preferred 
language,... On the other hand, if you ask Sympa to process a high level 
service (subscribe, unsubscribe, ...) via SOAP (could be XML-RPC) he 
will do it better than you could do it.
2/ If an external app accesse directly Sympa data, there is now way to 
ensure that this app will do the authentication / authorization jobs the 
same way.
3/ Whenever we'll make Sympa's DB structure evolve, you'll have to 
modify your PHP code. And it changes quite often...

Kevin McCann wrote:

> What do the developers of Sympa think about the idea of extending MySQL
> usage to include much more? I think it would be a very good thing to have
> list config, membership info and message archive info in a database. And
> even the incoming mail queue and transaction logs.
>
> I firmly believe that the internet community needs a mailing list manager
> (MLM ) that has a complete SQL backend. There is one such MLM, Lyris, but it
> is prohibitively expensive and not open source. But it performs very well
> and it is easy to build frontend applications on top of it (insteading of
> using their web interface).
>
> An open SQL-based MLM would support the development of diverse and useful
> frontend tools. PHP-based content management systems (PHP-Nuke, Postnuke,
> Xaraya, etc.) could tie a mailing list to a web community that has other
> features such as calendar, document uploads, and much more.
>
> Sympa developers have seen the need and the wisdom of supporting MySQL
> member tables. Why not go all the way? Backwards compatibility would be an
> issue, and not all Sympa users would want to have to run MySQL, so I propose
> a Sympa4MySQL offshoot.
>
> Any interest?
>
> I do intend to see this type of activity happen and will do whatever it
> takes. But it would be nice to have the participation of people who have MLM
> expertise and it would save time and money to build on an existing MLM
> instead of starting from scratch. If you're interested in a SQL-based MLM,
> please let me know.
>  
--
Olivier Salaun
Comite Reseau des Universites