Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaun - CRU <address@concealed>]

Here is a simple PHP script, providing basic mailing list services for 
listes.cru.fr, that will illustrate my previous message about SOAP usage 
with Sympa : http://listes.cru.fr/sampleClient.php
(PHP source code is available via the "View source" link)

I wrote:

> [...]
> 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...

--
Olivier Salaun
Comite Reseau des Universites