joel's thoughts

LSVClient aims to be a client library for interacting with Lsoft’s LISTSERV mailing list management product. LISTSERV provides an interface for programmatic interaction (called TCPGUI) which is somewhat poorly documented and a bit clunky, but rather powerful in that there are very few email-based commands (LISTSERV’s default means of receiving commands and issuing responses) which cannot be duplicated via TCPGUI. Unfortunately, TCPGUI interaction is via low-level tcp/ip socket reads and writes, and is only ‘documented’ by a sparsely-commented C program which doesn’t show all the possible options available to an application programmer who may wish to make use of the interface.

The purpose of LSVClient is to provide a full-featured Java class library for interacting with a LISTSERV system via the TCPGUI interface. Currently there is only one class, for taking a command string and passing it on to LISTSERV in the appropriate manner. In the future I plan to include ‘helper’ libraries, with which the programmer wouldn’t even need to know the details or exact syntax of LISTSERV commands.

I’m also considering a PHP port of this library (and possible subsequent class structure).  That’s somewhere on the list for how to spend all that copious free time I haven’t found yet.

SourceForge project page

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