Richard O. Hammer wrote:
Danny Angus wrote:
> ... JavaMail is explicitly and
> in its detail a mail client API, it lacks support in may areas for
the kind
> of server functionality James provides and it is not always easy, and
often
> impossible, to force James to use JavaMail interfaces and classes for
many
> of the tasks of a server. ...
Reflecting upon what Danny wrote, I wonder if Sun ever considered the
possibility of dividing the existing functionality in the JavaMail API.
It would be great for us if this existing functionality were divided
into a basic set, tools useful to both servers and clients, and an
extended set, just for clients. Then we developers of servers could
employ the basic set without having to disentangle ourselves from the
features intended for clients.
JavaMail includes a lot of important, basic work, promising to ease the
burdens of other developers. Because of this, we developers of servers
find ourselves sucked in, trying to use the good stuff that is inside
JavaMail for our purposes. But JavaMail would be much more valuable to
us if the basic tools were exposed free of the stipulations which have
been added for clients.
We did some of this. We separated the pieces of JavaMail into the
core API piece and the protocol provider pieces. That allows you
to pick just the pieces you need.
But we haven't considered carving the core API piece into multiple
pieces. And we wouldn't consider doing anything of that sort that
would break compatibility with the existing API. Requiring servers
to carry around the additional "client" parts of the core API doesn't
seem like a great burden. I'd be more concerned about adding significant
new server support that clients were required to carry around.
If you think some great advantage could be had by splitting the APIs in
this way, tell me more.
I think the more interesting question is how much can we morph the APIs
into something that's more useful for servers without compromising ease
of use for clients? I expect there to be many thousands of applications
using JavaMail for client mail access. I only expect tens (at most) of
applications using JavaMail to implement mail server functions.
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