Personal Proxies
Russ Beattie, Les Orchard, and others are discussing an idea for something called a "Universal Personal Proxy", or UPP (because every vaporware product must have a three letter acronym). "Personal" means "you run it yourself, on your own computer". "Proxy" means "it’s between you and something else". But it’s the "Universal" that’s the most important - it’s meant to express that this kind of software would work with all kinds of systems, not just the web or e-mail.
Of course, this is where I must chime in to say that my own little project, Hep Message Server, is a non-vaporware UPP that’s under active development. Les has said that he’s considering using Twisted for his app (Java being the other possibility). I sent him an e-mail yesterday saying that if he decides to go with Python I’ll have a nice chunk of working code for him to play with. So we’ll see what happens.
Meanwhile, I’ve started working on a GUI test app using my messaging library and PyGTK. This is mostly to give me a chance to test my library in a different kind of application than Hep. Also it’s a refreshing change from the pure-data, no-UI work I’ve been doing lately.
Working with a GUI also means that you notice speed problems much more quickly. I already found (and fixed) a problem with the Twisted pop3 client code that made it use lots of CPU while downloading big messages.
Screenshots
An RSS feed:
A POP3 mailbox:
The same mailbox, accessed directly through the filesystem:
