[Zope-dev] Medusa 0.5.1 maint release, planned for inclusion in Zope?

[Jeff Kowalczyk]

[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.