September 2000 Archives

Last night I cut over the Mailing list archive to AxKit which is a
mod_perl based XML/XSL-T system that will replace the old Cocoon setup that was giving us JVM Memory issues (not to mention the java 1.3 bugs I ran into).

I also fixed a bug in the code when e-mail was PGP Signed and was a multipart message. Things so far seem to be running pretty good and will allow me to concentrate more on getting the software more mature. I have had some requests by folks to have the code available for use in their projects. This is definately
something I am interested in I just need to determine the right way to
go about doing this and will provide you with an update when the code
is actually available.

As some of you might have noticed, one of my fun projects, Apache Mailing List archives, went live a week or so ago. I rewrote the mailing list software in OO perl from scratch using many
of the great modules available on CPAN. Instead of the usual creation of HTML, this rewrite creates XML documents that then can be converted to just about any format using technologies such as XSL-T, XSL-FOP etc. It has MIME attachments support and to a limited extend handles different charsets and
message/rfc822 forwarded messages.

I looked at using MHonarc and have it spit out XML instead, but it was totally written in Perl 4 style, which was something I wasn't too thrilled about. So, I decided to write this from scratch. It probably has about
70% or so of MHonarc's functionality, but over time I hope to surpass it.

As some (most?) of you might have noticed the site hasn't been very stable, which is mainly because of JVM memory issues. I currently am using Cocoon which is written in Java. It is one one of the longest publishing frameworks around that use XML and XSL-T, so I was hoping for some stability. I have been playing with the settings, but
haven't gotten it to fully work (yet).

I am also playing with other tools such as AxKit which are mod_perl based and something I would be more comfortable hacking on, so it could be we might switch to that in the near future.

Ultimately I would like to see a C apache module that implementsmost of the functionality in C that would then provide (XS) glue to mod_perl and such if someone wants to do something more dynamic with it. If I can find the time I will probably
spend a few nights coding something like that together.

There are still some minor bugs in the current version of my mailing list archive perl code that I hope to fix in the next few days. Once that is fixed I will have to write some documentation with it so people will know how to use it and I will ask the higher
powers if they would be alright with me throwing the code on CPAN.

I will try to keep you all posted.

Stuff is going pretty well. I will probably post in my next diary about my fun projects. I just read this article on Motley Fool and figured I would pass it along. Definitely worth a read.