Dear Thomas and RC-Dev team.
First of all thank you for all your time and leisure for that cool tool.
I have take a look into claws-mail to use it for the desktop instead of
a browser based solution. Mainly because the gpg/smime handling is much
harder then in a native client.
I have also take a look into the project which ports claws-mail to qt5,
but your mail opens new options ;-)
I write this to ask the question:
What are the target peoples for the new RC?
[ ] Desktop User
[ ] Mobile User
[ ] "Enterprise" User
I also think that php with JS or JS only is the current way for browser
solutions.
I like your suggestion on [1]
----
...
* Maybe even use a common API for client-server communication like the
one
suggested by Inbox.
...
* Contribute to the 3rd party modules rather than re-inventing the wheel
...
----
I would like to see in the new RC a proper "privacy" handling
(gpg,smime,...), which
is of course not easy.
jm2c
BR Aleks
Am 06-03-2015 18:10, schrieb Thomas Bruederli:
Dear developers and list lurkers
The Roundcube project will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year
and a decade is just right to stop for a while and let your thoughts
flow into new directions. Some of you may already have read my random
thoughts [1] about the future or Roundcube development and since I
wrote this down, the idea of a fresh new successor to Roundcube has
settled in my mind and won't go away that easily. The initial
responses on that were exclusively positive and this encourages us to
take it one step further now. Meanwhile I looked into many other
applications, libraries, frameworks, apis and programming languages to
find the best set of tools that would form a new top-noch webmail
application for the next decade. A loose and admittedly rather limited
collection has manifested on a wiki page [2] already.
The primary goal of rethinking Roundcube and webmail in general is
certainly to improve the user experience for everyday communication.
The second important aspect (at least for me as a developer) is to
have a slick, structured and flexible framework to build new features
and applications on top of. The current Roundcube codebase comes with
a variety of technological and conceptual constraints which rule the
ongoing development in a rather negative manner. Therefore thinking of
a successor that is completely independent and unrelated to the
current software stack is a tempting exercise which I'd like to invite
you to.
As already outlined in the blog post [1], the new Roundcube should
move most of the application logic from the server to the client.
Browsers are way more capable than they've been 10 years ago and times
of server-side template rendering are definitely over. Those who are
familiar with the Roundcube codebase will immediately understand that
such a change in paradigms also means a complete break of
compatibility with all existing components of Roundcube, including
plugins.
So let's free our mind from what we know about Roundcube and start
over. This can even go as far as choosing something else than PHP for
the server part which is supposed to be reduced to a simple wrapper
for data exchange between the backend storage (IMAP et al) and the
client application. Possible candidates are PHP (still), Python,
Node.js. At least these are the ones I'm currently familiar with. So
let's take a deeper look into these as I'm particularly interested in
your opinions, also from a deployment and hosting perspective.
* PHP
The major disadvantage of PHP that has become evident in Roundcube is
its short process lifetime requiring a full startup, database and IMAP
connection+authentication and closing all connections again for every
single HTTP request. Even FPM and persistent socket connections (which
IMO are still unreliable and should be avoided) don't really help to
overcome this.
The advantage of sticking with PHP certainly is that we can re-use
some of the existing parts from the Roundcube codebase, such as the
IMAP library, the plugin infrastructure etc. And in terms of
deployment: PHP is everywhere and lots of sysadmins are familiar with
deploying and maintaing and tweaking PHP applications.
* Python
Although Python isn't perfect for running as long-term processes
either, there are some well developed frameworks out there (e.g.
Twisted or Flask) which could be used to manage persistent connections
between the client (think websockets) and storage backends. In
addition to that, its easier to implement reactive applications with
an asynchronous architecture.
Regarding deployment: the Python universe has some well established
package repositories which make installation and deployment pretty
easy. From a sysadmin point of view, I have no idea how easy or
painful the maintenance of Python applications is. But the number of
hosting providers offering Python is certainly lower that for PHP.
* Node.js
The new star on the web app sky. Its architecture seems to make
node.js perfect for long-living server processes and maximum
throughput. Although we could use Javascript, which we're all familiar
with, the number of pitfalls to use that for server applications is
quite high. The learning curve here shouldn't be underestimated.
And opinions certainly go into two distinct directions when in comes
to deploying and scaling node applications. Installation should come
easy as there's basically only npm for all the package management and
everybody doing node is familiar with that.
OK, so question #1: what's your take on the programming language
choice?
The client part luckily doesn't need such a decision as there's only
Javascript for this. But the variety of ways how to build a
single-page web application and the number of frameworks helping you
to do this is mind-boggling. I have to admit that in this regard, I'm
one of the old fashioned web developers from the late 90ies and yet
have to learn a lot about the brave new world of web development. I
guess we can all agree that nobody wants to build a new web
application framework from scratch as we did for Roundcube due to the
lack of sophisticated solutions back in 2005. But choosing the right
tools might be essential for the timeline and the success of Roundcube
Next.
So here's question #2: what are your favorite javascript application
libraries and frameworks? What experience did you make let's say with
Angular or Backbone? What are the pitfalls?
Finally another big challenge we have when aiming to create the
perfect webmail application is the way we make the client and the
server talk together. We should carefully draft a proper data model
and an according protocol for this. For the data model, I already
tried to create a first draft in regards of what we already know the
application should be capable of. This includes multi-account support,
tagging, sharing and the extensibility for calendaring and other
groupware-like tasks.
For the client-server communication, there are some interesting
concepts out there but none of them actually seems to suit the purpose
we're after. They either lack the concept of sharing (i.e. ACL) or do
not account for collections such as multiple different address books
one account my have access to. The candidates I'm referring to are:
Nilas.com (former InboxApp), JMAP (by Fastmail) or the Gmail API (also
to be supported by Dovecot). All are good approaches and generally
point into the same direction but I couldn't say that one of them
would already solve the use-cases we want to cover in Roundcube. And
yes, we're seeking for a protocol and not an API [3] :-)
And this is question #3: who's willing to help us draft the perfect
protocol for this? I guess this should be a highly collaborative and
iterative process and I'm keen on any input from people who are
experienced with this type of task.
Thank you all for reading and participating in this survey. I'm really
excited to move this forward. All free and open source of course!
Best,
Thomas
[1]
https://roundcubeinbox.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/roundcube-next-if-we-would-start-over-again/
[2] http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Roundcube_Next
[3] https://vimeo.com/71278954
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