3-27-03 Jolt and The Simplest Thing

In a conversation here at the conference on "doing the simplest thing that could possibly work," I described the evolution of the backtalk system and how I had done many complicated things before realizing what the simplest thing was, which seems to be a common process. Figuring out the simplest thing is often very hard. But I explained my idea about the "through email" interface to Zope and someone pointed out that all I need to do is have a standalone python program which is attached to the email address (for the FAQ, WebLog, etc.). That program may perform some processing on the incoming email, but all it needs to do is to put it into a particular directory. Then the Zope Extension will run at regular intervals (apparently there's a cron for Zope) and it looks in the same directory and processes any text files that it finds there. This may not be as elegant as whatever may show up in Zope3 but it is easy, it will work, and it will solve any security issues that Jim brought up. There is no email server inside Zope receiving messages directly (thus opening a potential vulnerability), and the subdirectory provides a simple indirection. For what I'm talking about, it's not critical that the incoming email causes instant events, so polling the directory will work fine.

I've had this happen before: explaining an idea to other people has not only helped me understand it better, but they often give me an answer that I might not otherwise have gotten so quickly.