Online discussion

From Arnout Engelen

Online discussion takes place in various ways.

Different people like to communicate in different ways - some prefer mailinglists, some web forums, some like to use an NNTP reader.

Essentially, those aren't so different: they're all sending posts in threads.

There are various 'gateways' available that 'connect' these different ways of communicating, but IMHO this is really hackish. I would prefer a system where there's really one central repository of posts, and NNTP/Web/Mailinglists are simply different ways of looking at that data.

I wrote some more about that in a sourceforge project I dubbed Javelin

[edit] subetha

A good starting point seems to be subetha: already a full-blown, java-based mailinglist server, and it stores its messages using hibernate.

It requires jboss though, I'm not sure I like the complexity that might add.

[edit] dithaka

The sf.net summary of dithaka sounded promising, but upon closer inspection it looks like an over-generalized idea without much implementation.