[Hepserver-devel] Update

[Abe F. <ab...@fe...>]

Hi folks,

This list has been pretty quiet of late, so I wanted to pop in with a
quick update on Hep.

There are a couple of changes brewing that you should know about. 
First, I've decided to start taking advantage of more of Twisted -
plugins, the woven web development framework, authorization, etc. 
Basically, if it's in Twisted, and relevant to Hep, I'm going to use it,
rather than re-inventing the wheel myself.  I have enough experience
with Twisted now to feel comfortable that the developers know what
they're doing (and generally are smarter than me :-)).  Hopefully Hep
will end up being a good example of How To Do Cool Things With Twisted. 
For more details, see the Twisted mailing list, starting with this
message:

http://www.twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2003-June/004452.html

The other change coming has to do with connections and folders.  In the
current Hep CVS, when you create a connection you automatically get a
folder under "Connections" that contains a complete archive of all past
and present messages from that URL.  I've come to realize that there's
some flaws with that design, the formost of which is a lack of
flexibility.  Some people may want to continue to use the POP3
store-and-download model for pulling messages, or have new messages be
automatically sent to an email address.

So what I'm doing is seperating connections from folders completely. 
Connections let you access the current messages at a URL.  Folders let
you store messages on the Hep server.  Living in between folders and
connections will be Filters.  Filters will be message handling plugins
that decide what happens when a new message appears on a connection. 
You'll be able to choose which filters are active on which connections.

Examples:

* Archive Mailing Lists: When a message from a mailing list is recieved,
put it in a folder named "Mailing Lists/<ListName>", creating the folder
if necessary
* Send new messages to this URL (useful for aggregating RSS feeds into a
single weblog, or sending messages to an e-mail address
* Spam Filtering
* Archive News: Put messages in a folder with the same name as the
message source (this would give the same results as the current Hep
CVS).

I've also been slowly but surely improving a lot of the core Hep classes
to make the whole thing nicer and more flexible.  Some of my changes
have gone into CVS, but many have not as they break things and/or
require files to be moved.  I've been holding off for the sake of people
running Hep from CVS.  So a warning:  If you've been running Hep out of
CVS, you should either stop updating for a while, or be prepared to have
things break.

I've just finished of a very busy month at my day job, so I should have
more time going forward.  Expect to see some cool things soon!

Abe