[imp] question

[David Podolsky]

Yeah I agree, I do like google's nice dom/javascript and the quick
refresh rate it produces. However, seperating the front end from the
back isn't going to be the easiest depending on what you want. I redid
an interface for my mail server (http://www.wiredmail.org/screenshots/) 
because I wanted alot of the components on the main page (folders,
preview pane, etc) and I had to rewrite some of the code to allow for
this. However, a completely cosmetic change doesn't seem out of the
picture as they have a nice templating system. It just depends on what
you want. I would advise messing with the code and get an idea where its
all at.

dWP

On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 13:03, Noah Couture wrote:
> 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