Dave Colasurdo wrote:
Is the Javamail provider implementation an optional portion of the J2EE
specification? J2EE 1.4 states
"The JavaMail API specification does not require any specific protocol
providers, but the JavaMail reference implementation includes an
IMAP message store provider and an SMTP message transport provider."
The only provider that J2EE requires is the SMTP transport and we have
one of those (somewhere, when Geir finds it :-) ). The others contained
in the JavaMail RI are for accessing stores.
Nonetheless, is it still useful to have default providers available in
geronimo? Seems like both applications and the new javamail portlet
could take advantage of them..
The portlet is for configuring an SMTP transport so that should work (at
least with minimal effort if it doesn't now). It probably needs beefing
up to deal with odd mailservers and to add support for more complex
features (e.g. TLS) but it can send basic emails.
The SMTP transport usecase is fairly obvious - it allows an application
to send emails. Inbound SMTP would also be useful but unfortunately
JavaMail does not support that, about the best you can do would be an
inbound J2CA adaptor that delivered Messages to an MDB or other destination.
The other providers (e.g. IMAP or POP) would allow components to access
stores but that is a polling event that would need to be triggered by
something. This means there is a bit more application code needed to
handle accessing the store (like detecting what is a new mail) so adding
in the overhead of having to grab a provider from elsewhere is probably
not too problematic.
Finally, we did this JavaMail stuff because there was no option
available. Now the RI is available under CDDL we might want to consider
restributing that. If we decide not to then we should also consider
whether these providers would be better off as part of Apache James.
--
Jeremy
