Differences between revisions 2 and 42 (spanning 40 versions)

Sketch of a REST interface to Mailman

This interface isn't intended to be exposed to the Internet at large, so there's no mention of access control. It would be used as a back-end, on top of which the existing Mailman interface, or a fancy GUI application, or administrative scripts, could be built.

Resource Types

Lists
Users
Subscriptions (which tie together a single user and a single list).
Messages

Use Cases

h3. user

preferences (create, modify)

Changes a user can make to his list-specific settings, but also to all of his subscriptions on the server.

identity (create, modify, delete)

Changes a user can make to his list-specific identity, but also to all of his identities on all subscriptions on the server.

subscription (create, modify, delete)

Changes a user can make to his list-specific subscription settings e.g. preferred mail-address, but also to all of his subscriptions on the server.

h3. moderator

messages (approve, reject, discard, defer)

Handle pending requests.

subscriptions (approve, reject, defer)

Handle subscription tasks.

h3. owner

lists (create, modify, delete)

Manage list related tasks.

subscriptions (create, modify, delete)

Handle subscription tasks.

users (create, modify, delete)

Handle user management tasks.

statistics (read)

Read server, domain, list, user-related statistics e.g. Top Ten Posters, List Activity Meter

DEV/Original Use Cases

Principles

We use JSON. Libraries are available for most relevant programming languages and it's reasonably human-readable.

Also taking the recommendation of Leonard Richardson we will also honor the representation request in the Accept and Accept-Language headers.

DEV/Initial Considerations

URL Space

Unless otherwise specified, all these URLs return a data structure encoded as JSON.

URL	Action
/	List all top-level URLS
/sys	List all children URLS
/sys/version	Return Mailman and Python version (read-only)
/sys/plugins	List all plugins (name, description, author, version)
/sys/plugins/<plugin>	Detailed info on a plugin
/stats/	List of statistics available below
/stats/site	Show lists by activity (performance, tuning aspects)
/stats/domain	Show comparison of lists activity within the same domain
/stats/lists	list all lists within the domain
/stats/lists/<list-id>	Show list activity (new messages per day, replies to new messages same day)
/stats/users/	* Top Ten Senders * Top Ten Contributers * Show a list of all users
/stats/users/<username>	* Number of posts per site * Number of posts per domain * Number of posts per list * Bounces per mail-address
/users/	List of preferred email-addresses (e-Mail, Full name)
/users/<user-id>	All information related to that person
/users/<user-id/<setting>	Specific settings related with a person (identity, MIME-settings, Vacation, etc.)
/members/	A list of all members (address, mailinglist, role)
/members/...	membership management (moderated, unsubscribe, etc.)
/addresses/	A list of all email-addresses the system knows about
/addresses/<address>	information on an address (when was it validated, link to the user associated with it, etc.)
/lists/	returns list of list-ids (mailing list name, URL, public/private flag) tuples.
/lists/<list-id>	lists list homepage info
/list/<list-id>/<setting>	Arbitrary <settings> that configure a list
/domains/	List all domains within the site (hostname, web hostname, description, contact address)
/domains/<domain-id>	Manage that domain
/messages/	List of all URLs below
/messages/ids/	A list of all message-ids
/messages/ids/<message-id>	Message specific info: Sender, Recipient, Date, Subject, Size
/messages/hashes/	A list of all message-hashes
/messages/hashes/<message-hashes>	List of all message-hashes (see: DEV/Stable URLs)

Initial URL design

Unresolved Questions

What to do with bounce status/other logging information?

By this I mean the info that the Mailman core will generate that the other side may need to know.

How should passwords be dealt with?

Should there just be a password='abcdef' setting among all the others, or should the client be expected to SHA1-encode the password or do other stuff with it?

In the URL paths, do we want to use human-readable list names and e-mail addresses, or identifiers?

For example, do we want /list/mailman-developers/, or /list/123456/? The human-readable names make it convenient to poke around on the REST interface, but also require us to worry about quoting can you have a list named 'foo/bar'? and people may assemble URLs instead of looking up the correct one.

Comments

Cliff Ingham

I'm needing to build a standalone webservice for Mailman that our content manager can access. I'm most comfortable in PHP, so it's probably going to be PHP instead of Python.

But it will be needing to support authentication for usage. I'm planning on it just being a wrapper for the command line tools. If folks are interested, I could contribute our code as it goes. All our work here at the City of Bloomington is GPL. Either way, I'd be very interested in seeing a native RESTful interface come with Mailman

-  ⇤ ← Revision 2 as of 2008-02-08 08:32:14 → 
  Size: 2790
  Editor: amk@amk
  Comment:
+   ← Revision 42 as of 2009-04-01 17:37:18 → ⇥
  Size: 5673
  Editor: reedobrien
  Comment: added delete to user identity
-Deletions are marked like this.
+Additions are marked like this.
 Line 1:
-#pragma page-filename DEV/versions/3276804
+#pragma page-filename DEV/versions/7962759
 Line 3:
-This interface isn't intended to be exposed to the Internet at large, so there's no mention of 
access control.   It would be used as a back-end, on top of which the existing Mailman interface, 
or a fancy GUI application, or administrative scripts,
+This interface isn't intended to be exposed to the Internet at large, so there's no mention of
access control.   It would be used as a back-end, on top of which the existing Mailman interface,
or a fancy GUI application, or administrative scripts, could be built.
<<BR>>
 Line 11:
- * Messages.
+ * Messages
 Line 13:
- * Getting Mailman version.
 * Idea: Getting version of REST interface.
 * Creating a list
 * Deleting a list
 * Changing list settings (e.g. setting/clearing the moderation flag)
 * Retrieving list statistics (# of posts, bounces, etc.)
 * Adding a user to a list (using default options)
 * Checking if a user is subscribed to a particular list
 * Setting user options (digest, topics, etc.), both for a single list and across all subscribed-to lists.
 * Unsubscribing a user.
 * Retrieving user statistics (# of posts, bounce status, etc.)
+=== h3. user ===
 * '''preferences''' (create, modify)
Changes a user can make to his list-specific settings, but also to all of his subscriptions on the server.

 * '''identity''' (create, modify, delete)
Changes a user can make to his list-specific identity, but also to all of his identities on all subscriptions on the server.

 * '''subscription''' (create, modify, delete)
Changes a user can make to his list-specific subscription settings e.g. preferred mail-address, but also to all of his subscriptions on the server.

=== h3. moderator ===
 * '''messages''' (approve, reject, discard, defer)
Handle pending requests.

 * '''subscriptions''' (approve, reject, defer)
Handle subscription tasks.

=== h3. owner ===
 * '''lists''' (create, modify, delete)
Manage list related tasks.

 * '''subscriptions''' (create, modify, delete)
Handle subscription tasks.

 * '''users''' (create, modify, delete)
Handle user management tasks.

 * '''statistics''' (read)
Read server, domain, list, user-related statistics e.g. Top Ten Posters, List Activity Meter

[[DEV/Original Use Cases]]
-Line 25:
+Line 46:
-One question is what to use for the representation of each resource?  That is, when you access a user's settings by retrieving 
some URL, what format are the results in?  We could use:
+We use JSON.  Libraries are available for most relevant programming languages and it's reasonably human-readable.
<<BR>>
{{{{#!wiki important
Also taking the recommendation of Leonard Richardson we will also honor the representation request in the {{{Accept}}} and {{{Accept-Language}}} headers.
}}}}
-Line 28:
+Line 52:
- * HTML 
 * An existing XML format for representing data structures, such as XML-RPC's serialization.
 * A custom-designed XML format.
 * [[http://www.json.org/|JSON]]
I suggest using JSON.  Libraries are available for most relevant programming languages and it's reasonably human-readable.  
Designing a custom XML format seems unnecessary, but there's no obvious standard format to use.
+[[DEV/Initial Considerations]]<<BR>><<BR>><<BR>><<BR>><<BR>><<BR>><<BR>>
== URL Space ==
Unless otherwise specified, all these URLs return a data structure encoded as JSON.
-Line 35:
+Line 56:
-In the URL paths, do we want to use human-readable list names and e-mail addresses, or identifiers?  For example, do we want
/list/mailman-developers/, or /list/123456/?  The human-readable names make it convenient to poke around on the REST interface,
but also require us to worry about quoting -- can you have a list named 'foo/bar'? -- and people may assemble URLs instead of
+{{{#!table
'''URL <<BR>>'''
|| '''Action'''
==
/
|| List all top-level URLS <<BR>>
==
/sys
|| List all children URLS <<BR>>
==
/sys/version
|| Return Mailman and Python version (read-only)
==
/sys/plugins
|| List all plugins (name, description, author, version) <<BR>>
==
/sys/plugins/<plugin> <<BR>>
|| Detailed info on a plugin <<BR>>
==
/stats/
|| List of statistics available below
==
/stats/site
|| Show lists by activity (performance, tuning aspects) <<BR>>
==
/stats/domain
|| Show comparison of lists activity within the same domain <<BR>>
==
/stats/lists
|| list all lists within the domain <<BR>>
==
/stats/lists/<list-id>
|| Show list activity (new messages per day, replies to new messages same day)
==
/stats/users/
|| * Top Ten Senders
* Top Ten Contributers
* Show a list of all users
==
/stats/users/<username>
|| * Number of posts per site
* Number of posts per domain
* Number of posts per list
* Bounces per mail-address
==
/users/
|| List of preferred email-addresses (e-Mail, Full name) <<BR>>
==
/users/<user-id>
|| All information related to that person <<BR>>
==
/users/<user-id/<setting>
|| Specific settings related with a person (identity, MIME-settings, Vacation, etc.) <<BR>>
==
/members/
|| A list of all members (address, mailinglist, role) <<BR>>
==
/members/...
|| membership management (moderated, unsubscribe, etc.) <<BR>>
==
/addresses/
|| A list of all email-addresses the system knows about <<BR>>
==
/addresses/<address> <<BR>>
|| information on an address (when was it validated, link to the user associated with it, etc.) <<BR>>
==
/lists/
|| returns list of list-ids (mailing list name, URL, public/private flag) tuples.
==
/lists/<list-id>
|| lists list homepage info
==
/list/<list-id>/<setting>
|| Arbitrary <settings> that configure a list
==
/domains/
|| List all domains within the site (hostname, web hostname, description, contact address) <<BR>>
==
/domains/<domain-id> <<BR>>
|| Manage that domain <<BR>>
==
/messages/
|| List of all URLs below <<BR>>
==
/messages/ids/ <<BR>>
|| A list of all message-ids
==
/messages/ids/<message-id>
|| Message specific info: Sender, Recipient, Date, Subject, Size <<BR>>
==
/messages/hashes/ <<BR>>
|| A list of all message-hashes <<BR>>
==
/messages/hashes/<message-hashes> <<BR>>
|| List of all message-hashes (see: [[DEV/Stable URLs]])
}}}
[[../Initial URL design|Initial URL design]]
-Line 39:
+Line 154:
-== URL Space ==
/ --returns list of (mailing list name, URL, public/private flag) tuples.
+== Unresolved Questions ==
 * '''What to do with bounce status/other logging information?'''
By this I mean the info that the Mailman core will generate that the other side may need to know.
-Line 42:
+Line 158:
-/list/<list-id>/
+ * '''How should passwords be dealt with?'''
Should there just be a password='abcdef' setting among all the others, or should the
client be expected to SHA1-encode the password or do other stuff with it?
-Line 44:
+Line 162:
-/list/<list-id>/subscriptions -- list of (e-mail address, subscription URL) tuples.

/list/<list-id>/settings -- dictionary of list settings.

/user/<user-id>/subscriptions -- list of (mailing-list URL, subscription URL) tuples.

/user/<user-id>/settings -- dictionary of site-wide user settings (e.g. password).

/subscription/<sub-id>/settings -- dictionary of settings for this list/user.
+ * '''In the URL paths, do we want to use human-readable list names and e-mail addresses, or identifiers?'''
For example, do we want /list/mailman-developers/, or /list/123456/?  The human-readable names make it convenient to poke around on the REST interface, but also require us to worry about quoting --( can you have a list named 'foo/bar'? )-- and people may assemble URLs instead of looking up the correct one.