[Zope3-dev] Re: [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 and refactored components form a general-purpose server
framework like Medusa did? Ideally, additional protocol support would be
configured as 3rd party Zope3 product/components, inheriting from the
base components that you guys are writing now.

The topic kind of thudded when I brought it up last week on Zope-Dev,
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 are only
part of it, since that makes workflow programming on the messages only
indirect, and reduces the cross-platform flexibility of Zope
deployments, where most extensibility can be done in Python from a
standard binary distribution.

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