Ben Bucksch wrote:
> Thord Andersson wrote:
>
>> This sounds like great news but I have a (stupid?) question:
>
>
> Not at all.
>
>> What are the downsides of not using RDF anymore? I mean, why wasit
>> designed this
>> way?
>
>
> Drooling over RDF. ;-P
>
> No, I hope, there were better reasons. I only remember Aurora
> <http://www.mozilla.org/xpapps/aurora/>. (I just discovered, that this
> project was no completely abandonned, but only put on hold for, eh, a
> few years!)
>
> See also SmartMail <http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/smartmail.html>
> for the roots of Mailnews.
>
> Scott, the data will still be accessible as RDF, just not used for the
> thread pane, right?
>
>
I don't think we plan to keep the current datasource because it will be
hard to support both. If we did keep a datasource I imagine that we'd
want to make it use the new view classes. However, unless someone is
planning on maintaining it, I think the message data source will just
bit rot.
A few of the downsides of not using RDF including that we won't be
easily able to put messages in other widgets and we won't be able to
aggregate messages with other types of data like bookmarks. The latter
isn't that big of a deal because we'd basically taken away the ability
to do this previously as we kept making optimizations for performance.
The first isn't currently used anywhere, but it could have been. Maybe
one day we'll be able to make widgets like menus talk to the outliner view.
We used RDF originally because that was the architecture the mozilla
project was going to use. The outliner we have now didn't exist and we
didn't know it was possible to do it. We had ideas early on that RDF
wouldn't scale for the thread pane, but we always figured that we could
fix it and make it perform. We improved performance greatly (some of
you may remember it taking 10 minutes to load a 5000 message folder) but
never enough to get it to the level that we needed. The outliner widget
is the first hope that we can achieve our performance goals.
Scott
