[imp] Imp/Turba Rewritten W/Ajax (GMAIL On Steroids)

[Lee Hoffman]

Hey All,
Just about every free email provider out there has or is launching an  
AJAX version of their webmail clients. The usability of such  
applications (yahoo's new ajax mail, gmail, hotmail's new beta) blows  
non-ajax webmail clients out of the water. Unfortunately that means  
that those of us using horde/imp are providing somewhat antiquated  
services to our users.

About a year ago the small tech company i run saw this change coming,  
and began working on a a rewrite of horde/imp/turba with the explicit  
goal of creating something on the web that was as good or better than  
email software used on the desktop.

In order to facilitate development (our resources are very slim) we  
made a few design choices. We based the front end widgets and rpc  
calls on a pre-written library called Domapi (www.domapi.com).  This  
dramatically reduced the amount of work needed to implement the project.

We also did not really rewrite all of horde/imp/turba (or even touch  
any other horde applications). Instead we tried to leave as much in  
tact as possible and abstract new functionality/design choices into  
separate files (this also enabled us to license our code modules  
separately from horde's GPL, if we chose to do so). We used a hacked  
MVC design pattern for new files, and left everything else in tact.

In any case, we now have a very rough alpha demo of the software:

(read notes below first - i.e. USE FIREFOX TO VIEW IT FOR NOW)

http://dev.terabolic.com/webmail/radium/
Username: testuser839
Password: testuser3

A Couple Of Notes On the Status:

1) This only works in firefox right now. IE support is basically  
there, but there are a few bugs that prevent it from rendering right  
now.

2) Dragging messages, search are not fully implemented. Dragging is  
now available in domapi, and should be trivial to implement. Search  
is 75% there.

3) We haven't done much with spell check, however there are is GPL  
code that uses AJAX to simulate microsoft words style in-line spell  
correction and highlighting that i believe we could easily implement.

4) Things are slow now, however I am confident with some work, we can  
make this instantaneously fast. We need to optimize, compress data,  
and move from JSON RPC to AJAX for transfer mechanism.

5) There are still many bugs that need to be squashed.

6) There is tremendous functionality here, so i encourage everyone to  
play with this (right click or double click messages, resize panels,  
click on menus, etc...), compose a message.

We've put a significant amount of work into this, but obviously more  
is still needed to make it production quality.


Anyway we've used Horde/IMP/etc and many OSS applications for years,  
and they have contributed significantly to our business. For some  
time I've wanted to give back to the community, but haven't found a  
significant way to do it.

As a thank you to the OSS world, I'd like to give this software back  
to teh community. Neither I, nor anyone in my company, has any  
affiliation with Horde. I do not know what Horde has in teh works,  
nor do i know whether or not they would be interested in the code  
we've written.

Neither i nor my devs have the experience necessary to make this Open  
Source, and manage the project accordingly. As such my first offer is  
to give this to Horde and allow them to either branch off or  
incorporate what we've done into the horde itself.

If Horde is not interested, we'd like to find someone with experience  
in managing/running an OSS project to take the project on in a lead  
position.

Obviously licensing with respect to Domapi will be an issue, however  
i believe we will be able to work something out with the owner of the  
library (i have an acquaintance level relationship with him).

I look forward to hearing from everyone, and I thank the Horde team  
and all the developers who contribute to the project for making such  
extensible, capable pieces of software.


Sincerely,
Lee


Lee Hoffman
Chief Executive Officer
Terabolic, Inc.