[horde] babel?

[Michael Hoennig]

Hi Chuck,

> a bit: I think we both agree that there should be an interface for defining
> forum storage, and that such an interface could be implemented both with a
> database and with plaintext files (or xml files, which I think is a much
> better idea).

I agree.

> It (grep) won't work on windows, but that's probably something you're
> willing to live with. 

Despite the fact that I really ignore Windows for the most part, grep
runs on Windows as well! But actually I haven't meant necessarily the
shell utility grep, just the principle.

> For things like cell phones or palm pilots, stripping the layout from an
> html isn't going to be a very attractive option for generating alternate
> versions.

I confess, for such applications it would be faster to have an XML base
fileformat.

> I'd strongly reccomend, if we're going to have a file-based driver, that it
> use xml for all files.

Ok, it's easy to combine to fulfill my requirement of low CPU usage. For
example:

	007865.xml could be the original format of an article
	007865.html could be the cached HTML format of that article
	007865.wml could be the cached WML format of that article

A cronjob coud clean up the cached files older than n days, in most
forums the majority of articles is only needed within a few days after
posting. 

> > decent locking on updates
> >       there is only one piece of software accessing the pages
> >       anyway - so locking should be easy. On the other hand:
> >       a supporting database is not a real problem for me, I
> >       just like to have th
> 
> Saying only one piece of software is accessing the pages is kind of vague -
> conceptually, sure, but really it's a bunch of different webserver processes
> (or threads), and then what if you want to put snippets of the content on a
> summary page, like "last comment posted"?

That's actually what I meant. Of cause there are multiple threads or
processes accessing the files. But just having a single implementation
accessing these files, it is relatively easy to keep a locking protocol.

> > Does it make sense to take the existing babel as a base or does it make
> > more sense to start from scratch? 
> It probably makes
> sense to steal where we possibly can (and from other open source systems
> too), but to start from scratch.

Ok. Is it then still babel ...

Lets summarize:

- We want to define an API for article storage, access and searching.
- We want to offer two implementations, one with database as storage,
	the other with XML files in the file system as storage.
- We want to cache the least accessed files to reduce CPU usage.
- We want to support multiple layouts (i.e. for WML, HTML) of the
articles.

Anything else?

What about the idea coupling a mailinglist with a forum? 

	Michael

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