Subj : Clearing Houz
To   : apam
From : deon
Date : Fri Oct 07 2022 05:44 pm

  Re: Clearing Houz
  By: apam to deon on Fri Oct 07 2022 04:05 pm

Howdy,

 > I was just wondering how you store messages in Clearing Houz? I think
 > from memory you use couchdb or cockroach db or something?

So I started Clearing Houz using mongodb only because, I think like you, I wanted to check it out. For me it was problematic because it doesnt enforce a schema (it's benefit) and I found I was spending too much time trying to fix problems, only to find I had a typo in the schema or query here and there. (And probably because I dont know it natively like SQL, so learning how to query it outside of clrghouz was a learning curve I was too impatient to learn.)

I also wanted the replication - one of the designs I had for Clearing Houz, so that nodes could drop mail off (and pick it up) from any place. I think mongo can do, but I had to reasearch how to do it.

So I did switch to CockroachDB - which is SQL and uses the postgres protocol (and in doing so, I discovered an emabarrising amount of mistakes that I had made :) It provided the geo replication that I was wanting out of the box and it is very easy to use (probably because I know SQL better).

(Meatlotion provided a couple of nodes for cockroach - so when you were hitting the website (and hub 3 was tossing mail) it was actually updating the DB that was spread between AU and UK.)

I've put Clearing Houz to sleep for a bit, mainly because I'm busy with other things and because I need to address a latency issue that I thought was making the web experience not great. (I wanted to enable sysops to configure, sign up and almost be able to self-diagnose why their mail wasnt flowing via it). So I may end up ditching cockroachdb if I cant fix that... :(

 > Is that using a similar format to JSON?

Mongo does return (and I guess does accept) JSON data when querying and storing. I was actually using via an SQL like interface (Clearing Houz is built on laravel - and it has a query interface called eloquent that abstracts the database store).

 > I'm going to experiment with MongoDB on my rust BBS, and wondered if
 > there was a way to transmit messages in JSON format.
 >
 > I don't really want to implement FTN, as this BBS is for experimenting,
 > but I thought it might be fun to experiment with building a new sort of "network".
 >
 > I was wondering if something like clearing houz would be able to easily
 > gate messages between FTN and whatever?

That was another one of my goals with Clearing Houz - given that I had messages in "a database", writing different "packet" formats should be very easy - and I had thought of enabling an API to get/put echomail using a POST with a JSON payload. In my case I'd consume the JSON payload before it got to the DB, but in terms of sharing data around, I do think its a good any easy format to use. (I do a lot of APIs and JSON payloads.)

 > Anyway, I've not thought this through very much yet, just tossing out
 > ideas of things that might be fun to do (My son is out for the day with
 > his mum visiting poppy - so I have some free time ;P)

Awesome, treasures those moments, they seem to get smaller every day !

If you want to play with something, let me know, and I'll turn back on clearing houz - happy to set something up if you need another target...


....лоеп
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