[spambayes-dev] followup: Windows implementation using Command line(forSpamBayes)

[Kenny Pitt]

Rob McEwen wrote:
> while I am a
> rather accomplished vb.net and Javascript programmer, Perl/Python
> looks like "greek" to me.

Perl still looks like greek to me, too. <grin>  Python, on the other hand,
is very easy to learn.  Since you already understand programming in general,
you should have no problem picking up enough Python syntax to do some basic
tweaking.  Check out the "Beginner's Guide to Python"
<http://www.python.org/topics/learn/>, which has some good links for getting
you started.  You'll probably be a convert in no time! <wink>

> Regarding the "windows service" question, the stuff in the
> sb_bnserver script may do the trick. Most importantly, I just don't
> want the performance to be adversely impacted by the
> loading/unloading of the app for EVERY SINGLE message. Also, at the
> same time, another concern I have is that, if this single program
> stays in memory for this purpose, wouldn't I also need to make sure
> that this program is multi-threaded for possible concurrent
> operations... 

I'm not very familiar with the ins and outs of the sb_bnfilter/sb_bnserver
scripts, so maybe someone else can jump in with more details.  In general,
any server program will need to handle concurrency issues.  Python has full
support for threading and synchronization, so sb_bnserver may already handle
this but I can't personally vouch for that.

> AND that THIS program "gets the call" (singleton model?)

I believe that the server just listens on a TCP/IP socket, and the filter
program makes a connection to that socket to send a message to be processed.
Only one process can listen on that socket, so the requests should always go
to the correct server process.

-- 
Kenny Pitt