I am trying to write spam assassin in java, using the already written spam assassin rules (which is written in perl)
My immediate reaction is "Why?" I could see the motivation of the person who once asked a similar question about writing a version in C, expecting a big speed increase, but that doesn't apply to Java. My second reaction is to wonder how one person can expect to duplicate the work of the entire group of developers who are still working as hard as they can on the task of completing SpamAssassin version 3.0 starting from a working version 2.63. SpamAssassin is not just a set of regexps that you can translate to a Java regexp parser. Will you want to use the same class structure for objects in Java as make sense in perl? Are you going to write or find your own versions of the CPAN modules that the SA developers did not have to spend time writing themselves?
It might be a fun project to rewrite SpamAssassin in Java, but I can't see any rationale for only allowing 100% Java programs on an enterprise server unless you are a Sun executive. It seems it would be a whole lot more useful to the JAMES project if you found an efficient way to pipe its mail through a SpamAssassin daemon running in perl.
I will make the code available once I have completed the project.
That's admirable, but I can't imagine how it would be useful to us unless you came up with basic improvements that apply across languages. Of course, anyone who really does have a problem running perl but no problem running Java wold appreciate the work.
thanks for your help. Let me if you are at all confused by what I am asking :)
Perhaps I am confused. I don't mean to be negative, and of course you are free to do what you want with your project, but I don't see anything here that would induce me to take away from the little time I have to volunteer helping get SpamAssassin written to try anything so massive as educating someone in the nitty gritty details of SpamAssassin's code.
Please note that I am just one volunteer here and I do not speak for everyone. However, if nobody else sees a benefit of this to the SpamAssassin development project, then this will quickly become a topic not suitable for the spamassassin-dev mailing list. I am not asking you to go away. I'm just saying that if thread goes off into a discussion of how to port the code to Java with no benefits to the original project, I don't think it will be relevant to this list.
-- sidney
