Skip to Main Content
Practical Internet Groupware
book

Practical Internet Groupware

by Jon Udell
October 1999
Beginner content levelBeginner
521 pages
15h 28m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Practical Internet Groupware

Integrating Web and Messaging Components

The Netscape and Microsoft mail/news clients aren’t as flexible or programmable as their counterpart browsers, and that’s a problem for groupware developers who want to leverage and customize these messaging tools. But mail and news servers, like web servers, are wonderfully flexible and programmable components. The underlying protocols—SMPT, NNTP, and HTTP—are simple enough to operate manually, and are therefore well supported by scripting languages such as Perl. A script can access mail, news, or web services almost as easily as an interactive mailreader, newsreader, or browser.

In Part III, we exploited the component nature of Internet services to create hybrid groupware applications. In Chapter 9, for example, we built a reviewable docbase system that joins an XML docbase to an NNTP newsgroup; we used the NNTP API to populate the newsgroup with a discussion framework linked to the docbase; we used conventional CGI techniques to transform comments issuing from the docbase into correlated newsgroup postings. An alternative version of the reviewable docbase idea relied on email instead of a newsgroup, providing a lighter solution requiring no web or NNTP machinery.

These applications surprise some people, but really they shouldn’t. Integration of web technology with Internet messaging doesn’t happen automatically, but thanks to the profound componentization of the core services, solutions are eminently scriptable.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Web Operations

Web Operations

John Allspaw, Jesse Robbins

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565925378Catalog PageErrata