[Chris] Does Zope 3 use Medusa at all?

[Stephan] No. Shane rewrote all of the HTTP Server and I am writing right now the FTP server (which copies some of the Medusa code, but much is cleaned). We added interfaces and made it more component-based.

[Jeff] That's good news about an interface refactoring, it was a little confusing researching the present customized version. My interest in (the Medusa revision) was to keep alive the idea of setting up hooks for developers to build support for other protocols (IMAP, NNTP, Jabber, SMTP, SMS etc.) in a standard, configurable way in Zope3. Will your rewritten components form on a general-purpose server framework like Medusa? Ideally, the support would be as easily added as other 3rd party Zope3 product/components, inheriting from the base components you guys are writing now.

The topic kind of thudded when I brought it up last week, but I think it is important to keep an open mind about it while Zope3 is still brewing. Interfaces to external mail and other servers is only part of it, since that makes workflow programming on the messages much less direct, and reduces the cross-platform flexibility of Zope deployments, where most extensibility is done in Python.

Lots of *small* businesses need what MS Exchange offers, but can't afford it nor safely maintain its staggering complexity. As these python protocol implmentations crop up, I'd like to see Zope3 offer those writers a mature, cross-platform back-end to store their messages in, if they are willing to implement a few well-defined interfaces.