NMollom

It’s been a forthnight since Mollom released their API, and I’ve been working some spare moments on a library wrapper for that API. Given that here are wrappers for Drupal, PHP, Ruby, Java and Python, I figured that a .Net version was missing too. Also, I can use this for a future project, so it’s not a complete waste of (free) time.

Anyway.

NMollom, a wrapper for the Mollom API. Building the library wasn’t really hard, as the API exposes a set of  XmlRpc calls you can use to talk with Mollom. Using a free XmlRpc library for .Net, a proof of concept lib was quickly built. The challenge was however to conceive something that abstracted the details of the API away (mainly the session management) but still keeping the use of the library easy but also versatile. I still like perl’s TIMTOWTDI, so you still have a number of options to work with the API.

The objects that the main API class returns are mostly serializable, so they can be stored in ViewState, or Session, or even Application. Or to a file. This is necessary since we’re dealing with a stateless architecture (the web). Basically, the session_id the various Mollom calls return is kept private inside the objects since you don’t really need to know it’s actual value. Keeping it for reference (for future calls) is the most important thing. That said: you can still read the value if you really want it.

But this is just a wrapper around the Mollom API, and you still need to do quite some work behind the screens to get it working. So the next step is some ASP.Net controls that do the dirty work for you. Using the current wrapper library, of course.

All of this is open sourced under a MIT license. If you want to help or codevelop this, feel free to contact me and I’ll give you access to the repository. Or you can send me a patchfile. Whatever suits you best.