[imp] question

[Noah Couture]

Hi All,

We've been looking at developing a web based email system, and as far
as I can tell IMP seems to be one of the best ones around.  You all
have done a very nice job on it.

Well, what I have been considering doing is slightly different though,
in terms of interface.  We really like the way gmail uses background
requests to simplify the user interface and cut down on network
traffic.  Its really slick having everything in one html page and
refreshing certain parts of the page using dom/javascript.  I've been
putting together some code to test this type of framework, and I
really think that it can work for a webmail system.  But a whole
system requires a bunch of code, particularly when you get into areas
like displaying multipart mime messages nicely, composing messages,
etc.

So, lets say I wanted to basically develop a very different front end
like i've described.  I wonder how difficult it would be with IMP? 
I've done some testing using scott andrews xml-rpc thingy
(http://www.scottandrew.com/xml-rpc/) and some simple IMAP calls to
basically get a list of folders and the contents of a particular
folder.   I used xml-rpc and then merged the xml with xsl documents in
the client.  The tricky part was trying to understand xsl.  I'm
actually not sure that that scheme is the way to go, but I got it to
work for some things.  Google actually just passes raw javascript
arrays to avoid the overhead of xml.  I found that using gzip does
away with the overhead of the xml format rather nicely, I suppose at
some cpu cost.  Anyways, i'm meandering, I could share the code i've
got so far if anyone is actually interested in this approach.  Barring
that, i'd really appreciate some feedback in terms of how much work it
might be to develop a different front end.  I  would really hope to
figure out a way to be able to drop in this front end over IMP so that
I would be able to continue to upgrade my HORDE/IMP installation and
benefit from any new features or fixes with minimal impact to my
stuff.

Ok, thanks for any input!

noah