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| We use JSON. Libraries are available for most relevant programming languages and it's reasonably human-readable. |
We use JSON. Libraries are available for most relevant programming languages and it's reasonably human-readable.<<BR>> |
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| Initial Considerations |
[[DEV/Initial Considerations]]<<BR>> |
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)
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
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.
URL Space
Unless otherwise specified, all these URLs return a data structure encoded as JSON.
| URL |
Action |
| / | TODO: What does it list? |
| /sys | TODO: What does it list? |
| /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 |
| /stats/site | TODO: What does it list? Show lists by activity |
| /stats/domain | TODO: What does it list? Show comparison of lists activity within the same domain |
| /stats/list | TODO: What does it list? Show list activity (new messages per day, replies to new messages same day) |
| /stats/users | TODO: What does it list?
|
| /stats/users/<username> | TODO: What does it list? |
| /users/ | TODO: What does it list? List of all users |
| /users/<username> | TODO: What does it list? |
| /subscriptions/ | TODO: What does it list? |
| /subscriptions/... | TODO: What's beneath? |
| /addresses/ | TODO: What's beneath? |
| /lists/ | returns list of (mailing list name, URL, public/private flag) tuples. POST is used to create a new list and redirect |
| /lists/<list-id> | lists list homepage info |
| /list/<list-id>/<setting> | Arbitrary <settings> that configure a list |
| /domains/ | TODO: What does it list? List all lists within a domain? Configure global/default settings of all lists within the domain? |
| /messages/ | A list of all messages? No... |
| /messages/<message-id> | TODO: What does it list? Header-Info: Sender, Recipient, Date, Subject, Size |
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
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