Plone NGO Mailing List Christian Aid go for Microsoft over Open Source

[Rob Miller]

sisi wrote:
> michael nt milne wrote:

>> I'm not sure if MailBoxer is a solid solution from some comments on the
>> Zope list. Doesn't it use the ZODB for storing all the email etc?
> 
> I don't know I'm afraid. I'm backing the concept more than the technical
> details at this stage. I hope someone who is developing listen can
> answer this, I think they are on the list.

MailBoxer does use the ZODB for mail message storage, yes.  and listen, while 
actually faster and more scalable than MailBoxer, from our initial testing, 
does use MailBoxer, and thus stored the messages in the ZODB.

i was skeptical of this approach myself when we started the listen project, 
but alec mitchell, who has written nearly all of the listen code to date, sold 
me on the idea.  the ZODB by itself is actually very scalable and very fast in 
situations where there's a high read:write ratio; it's quite suitable for 
storing a mailing list archive.  the slow-down related to objects in the ZODB 
is usually related to the rich behaviour that those objects contain... once 
you add CMF / Plone / AT to the mix, things get sloooooow.

alec's solution was to build plone_schemas, which is a package that allows 
very thin, Z3-schema driven objects to interact w/ plone in a very minimal 
way.  as a result, the mailing list messages are quite lean, and are well 
suited to fast, scalable (de)serialization in the ZODB.

alec won me over with his thorough investigation of the various solutions and 
options, and i think we've made good choices.  it is our intent to support 
listen being able to scale; we hope to eventually have many thousands of 
listen-based mailing lists hosted on openplans.org, and hopefully at least a 
few of these will likely have many thousands of users.  that being said, we're 
working on a lot of software, and while we know that listen needs some 
attention, it's not at the top of our priority queue right now.

hope this helps,

-r