I made some progress with my NNTP to XML-RPC gateway. I wrote methods to find the lowest and highest messageID for a given newsgroup. I also wrote methods to get a message and a message's body. I'll post some code later today or tomorrow.
I haven't been as far as I wanted today. I wanted to implement a method returning a list of messageID posted between a given date and now but I had a problem with my news server. The reason I want to write this method is quite simple: I want to be able to write an RSS file for a newsgroup. Instead of using a news reader to check if there are new posts in a given newsgroup, one could just subscribe to the newsgroup's RSS file. I can see a module generating a new RSS file for all the newsgroup of a local server every one or two hours. These RSS file could reside on a web server on an intranet.
It would work this way:
The Perl NNTP to XML-RPC gateway would reside on the same machine as the NNTP server. A Perl script started by Cron every hour (or two) would generate all the RSS file. This Perl script will be on the same machine as the web server. The webserver would serve these RSS files to Weblogs subscribing to them.
Another possibility would be to write a template and some scripts in Radio to display the messages in a given newsgroup. In this case Radio would talk strait to the gateway (through XML-RPC) sitting on the same machine as the NNTP server.
I had problem with the INN server I installed two week-ends ago: Whenever I issue a "newnews" command, it returns an error message saying: "NNTPERROR: 502 NEWNEWS command disabled by administrator". I looked in Google and I already did what should be done: putting "allownewnews: true" in my inn.conf. I looked further and found this page dealing with readers.conf. I modified readers.conf and it didn't improve the situation. I'll wait until somebody answer my post to news.software.nntp. while looking at Google hit for that search, I found this a bit outdated useful link.
