On Fri, 2007-09-07 at 01:11 +0930, Dan Shearer wrote: > There has been some discussion about what the next libmapi bindings > should be now Julien has Perl working. I'd be interested in people's > views on a slightly wider approach than just looking at the possible > languages. > > I am wondering if now is a good time to think about a scripting language for > OC > generally. Scripting makes sense for users both client side and server side. > I'd like to propose PHP rather than Python, Ruby or whatever because: > > 1. There are many groupware-related clients written in PHP and > some of them are very active in adding new mail and calendaring > features. I expect they will be very interested to be able to do > native Exchange integration with the other libmapi features too. > There are not many active projects of this type in Python. > > 2. OpenChange needs a scripting language. PHP is the natural > equivalent to Visual Basic (only not nearly as horrible!) > We can use PHP to do things like specify rules client or server-side, > and of course to enable users to quickly create simple > applications. > > 3. PHP is naturally a web language, but it works perfectly well > as a portable general-purpose console language just like Perl. > > 4. PHP can be used for GUI applications as well (there are Gtk and > Qt/KDE bindings, probably others.) So we can implement simple > GUI applications. I'm thinkinging of small admin tools for example.
To be honest, I think PHP would be a horrible choice. It is barely ok for Websites, but in term of using it for console or GUI apps, python is 100 times more used and generally better. (Btw PHP imo is more horrible then VB even, heck, it is the only language I know that is vulnerable at the language level (include/import/...)). In any case I think the OpenChange project should really concentrate on the core functionality, which is the client library and the server side. Don't get sidetracked on other stuff, if people is really interested in using libmapi, bindings will easily pop up, and "choosing" a scripting language would cut out all the others, which, at this point, I think it is a dumb move, in any case PHP is not really used for anything but the web, choosing it as the OC scripting language would gain you basically nothing but headaches. Also IIRC the PHP license is incompatible with the GPL so using PHP would be difficult and troublesome anyway. Let interested parties maintain bindings and applications. Samba history shows that embedding web stuff is not worth it unless there is strong motivation in maintaining it, otherwise it will just bit-rot. Simo. -- Simo Sorce Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://samba.org _______________________________________________ devel mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.openchange.org/listinfo/devel
