hey all, Thought I would put this thought out here. After setting up dbmail on one system as a means of simply handling multiple domains for users that didn't need a login in the system itself, I got to thinking. "hmmmm self, dbmail and exchange both keep email in a database isn't that funny?"
"yes", I said to myself "it is. I wonder whats keeping them from expanding out into, oh I don't know, group address books and group scheduling, basically like exchange does it." "Ah, but your forgetting that there is no real good standard that covers those basis. You are right in your thinking that exchange sucks, and is very annoying, but it does have the MAPI protocol, making things somewhat easy." "arggh, but its so crap, isn't it? I mean, since MAPI is so ugly and closed, there aren't many affordable flexible clients for it. Really, all you've got is exchange. Think about the current customer you are dealing with which simply wanted their email on their blackberrys too. They had to download even more expensive software to integrate their blackberrys into exchange." "Self", I said "think a little harder. Why, didn't you just write a demo using webservices using coldfusion, java midlets, flash, php, and good ol' fashioned html?" "Why, yes I did. And damn was that easier than I was expecting. Ahhh, I see where you going with this. Take those PHP skills I got, learn SOAP a little better, and slap on a webservice interface, create a little schema, and Bob's your uncle." "and then you could create thin clients all over the place!" "exactly...." "but, what would you make your first client out of? What would be the best way?" "Well, you've been meaning to learn XUl and all that stuff, haven't you." "why, yes" "So create a mozilla app as your outlook beater" "awesome idea chuck, your so smart" "why, thanks chuck" So this is the story. I've written a small limited set of webservice frontend for dbmail. I've also written a small, rather capable mozilla frontend for it. This project incorporates all kinds of elements, and it would be gunning for a sort of "exchange in a box" kind of design. The distributed elements sort of have to make so. The webservices work as far as I have tested them, and the XUL frontend is capable of recieving and sending email, as well as handling folders and whatnot. I've also sketched out on paper a global address book schema that fits into dbmail 1.1 design. I'm looking for people who can A) light a fire up my ass to make this happen B) understand webservices better (and can help me fill in the gaps of my own knowledge especially when dealing with nuSOAP and WSDL) C) Can help me lay out a plan for developing something like this which is so dependent on other technologies (dbmail-smtp, MTA's, php, myauth for apache, and hopefully clients written in numerous other languages). D) Have a fuller grasp of the capabilities of XUL. Currently I got stuck on drag and drop and gave up the ghost in favour of other projects. The main problem, for anyone who follows XUL, is that I want to make the client be downloaded/run from the web browser, instead of packaging and deploying. Which would make upgrading clients very easy (just replace these files in this dir....). E) Wondering if I'm absolutely crazy, and if so, to tell me. I don't like HTML/webserver apps that pull off these kinds of things. response time is too slow, and the implementation is kind of poor. So there it is, am I crazy or not? (note: I subscribe in digest form, so replies, if any, might be slow) feel free to ask about design details or anything else. -chuck -------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lemure.net all that tasty chuck fun, without the nasty aftertaste
