Chris Anderson wrote:
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Adam Kocoloski<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Nitin, sure. I think Paul just meant that if we wrote it for
replication, anyone could use the same facility to build something like what
you're talking about. After all, the replicator just speaks to CouchDB
servers using the same HTTP requests as everyone else.
I'm sure jchris knows better whether mimeparse would be suitable for this.
mimeparse.js is just a library for handing Accept headers. It's got
nothing to do with the multipart format.
I just saw that in the meanwhile so yeah that's not useful.
on the rest of your topic, does storing emails as attachments do the trick?
not quite - a MIME message has it's own attachments - a MIME message = a
doc not an attachment.
also, I'm of the opinion that the rest of the world should learn to
speak JSON. :)
Yes and please don't misunderstand the email to mean MIME is
better/worse/a substitute for JSON.
I am working very hard to move the entire world of academic
bibliographic data in bibtex to JSON, so I come here not to bury JSON
but to praise him :-)
more pragmatically, if you wanted to act as a smtp server, you'd
probably be able to wrap one around couch pretty easily. I've seen it
done in erlang (sorry, closed-source) but I'm guessing that
integrating Lamson wouldn't be hard.
Again - never mentioned SMTP. Moving MIME documents as data between
endpoints can be done independent of SMTP, hopefully over REST HTTP
transfer.
I can take a floppy and put a bunch of MIME docs with the right headers
in a file with an inbox format, fly to the other end of the world in an
airplane - deliver it and someone can open it up in Thunderbird with no
knowledge of the airplane-floppy protocol. Data and Protocol are
orthogonal in email.
In fact before the days of DNS and SMTP people did email with UUCP.
Painful but it worked.
Data and protocol are orthogonal in email - we tend to confuse and
conflate them all the time.
http://lamsonproject.org/
Yeah Zed is doing amazing things with Python SMTP - but not referring in
SMTP in this discussion - just in new ways to move MIME docs around
*without* SMTP :-).
Want to act not as an SMTP server but as a web-MIME-interchange
platform. A platform that maybe has access to an external web-SMTP
gateway somewhere else so it can inject email into the existing mail
infrastructure. But it can also do p2p messaging over HTTP independent
of SMTP, between trusted auth'ed collections of endpoints.
Hopefully someday the SMTP gateway may be less useful.
Nitin
Chris
Cheers,
Adam
On Aug 6, 2009, at 5:26 PM, Nitin Borwankar wrote:
Hi Paul,
I never used the word replication - it should be possible to create a REST
based couchapp driven MIME transfer p2p web quiteindependent of replication
which is also cool. Front the couchapp with the usual auth-proxy stuff for
now so only auth'ed people can communicate with you.
Just replace JSON with MIME in all the reference docs and make the URL's
point to a design doc that does the transformations.
On the way out it could be just _shows or an _list that takes multiple
objects and wraps them as a mime multipart.
On the way in set up some REST endpoints that take POST's, parse mime
multiparts ( jchris's mimeparser?) convert to Couch docs, manage
attachments and puts them in _attachments ... and we're off to the races -
free user controlled, MIME-and-Mail-as-aplatform driven webmail apps for
all.
Yay Couch!
Nitin
Paul Davis wrote:
Definitely some interesting points here. There have been discussions
on using multipart-mime messaging in the replication protocol which
could setup for some interesting prospects like this. I'm not sure on
specifics in terms of replication, but having an endpoint that allows
edits via multipart-mime could be a very fun thing to play with.
Also, AFAIK there's nothing that prevents an isomorphic
representation. As you point out, couchdb-python handles everything
just fine here.
Paul Davis
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Nitin Borwankar<[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi guys,
I see that the python based dump/load uses MIME multipart docs as an
on-disk
serialisation format for couchdb databases.
An overall question then arises - can CouchDB be considered a MIME
database
which oh also happens to talk JSON?
So before that - is there a 1-1 strong correspondence between a CouchDB
document and a MIME multipart, or are there things around the edges that
are
crufty - I would assume a strong correspondence since dump/load uses it
and
I haven't seen any caveast about document content that is not dumpable.
So assuming the 1-1 correspondence - could one use some "translation
layer"
couchapp that accepts arbitrary content/type + multipart-mixed MIME
object
over HTTP and then transparenty serialise them to JSON underneath.
Given that dump/load already does this - it would see that there are no
obvious glaring flaws in this logic - but I have been known to be wrong,
once :-).
If this is indeed feasible - then each CouchDB + MIME-trans becomes a
web
mail node - and Couch begins to be the platform for a messaging
revolution
as well as an application revolution. I am thinking now not as CouchDB
for
backing up your email - but CouchDB as your mail client/server for p2p
MIME
based "email".
Permissions etc are important to avoid complete disaster of course - but
private high quality communication that just reuses existing message
formats, with better storage and transport would seem like an idea whose
time has come a long time ago and has been knocking at the door for a
decade.
Yes, yes, there's the issue of spam - so see the P.S.
Just a few idle thoughts,
Nitin
P.S. Back in 1998 I tried to convince Sybase to have MIME as a native
type
in the db and it even got speced out ( I have the spec with the date on
it!
) but got canned becous ethe VP of enginnering wanted to know "what was
the
market exactly for this kind of stuff". Other than that I was granted
a
patent for doing p2p discussions over email back in 2003 - I let it
expire
for multiple reasons. So I am somewhat non-naive about and aware of the
issues and pitfalls around this sort of thinking. At the same time I am
of
the strong belief that when one looks at messages as data to be moved
around
between endpoints with well defined addressing schemes, and one ignores
the
protocols for a bit, then all sorts of fun things start to happen.
37% of all statistics are made up on the spot
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nitin Borwankar
[email protected]
