On 1/28/07, Andrew C. Oliver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
RESTfulness is a red herring.
not so much a red herring as an orthogonal kipper ;-) yes, i admit i used a lie of juxaposition
It is not lack of "RESTfulness" that makes IMAP suck. It is that it is a complex and inspecific protocol with laborious requirements on the server that are better reserved for the client (such as N level mime parsing where N > 1).
+1 IMAP is just a plain bad protocol and yes, it would be possible to create a better IMAP but the point is: why bother? i'm more interested in an alternative protocol which can be layered on HTTP
Also POLL is not necessarily lighter way than PUSH. In fact PUSH probably should be the default behavior and this is easily achievable in a lightweight manner using HTTP 1.1 persistent connections. A proper protocol implemented on top of HTTP would scale nicely as existing load balancers and routers know how to aggregate these 100 persistent connections into a bout 1. 100 CLIENTS -----100 PERSISTENT CONNECTIONS->LOADBALANCER----1 PERSISTENT CONNECTION--->MAIL SERVER 100 clients with persistent connections in a "keep-alive" state would consume next to no resources on the mail server. Thus POLL vs PUSH is of questionable importance. If you have PUSH you should have strong specs to fall back to PUSH (IMAP doesn't) but from a performance perspective it is of very marginal importance on the right infrastructure.
given the right protocol, i agree the protocol would need to ensure that all clients interested in a particular collection of emails could be fed the same information
ATOM/RSS is also of little importance. That is the equivalent of the LIST (POP) or FETCH HEADERS commands (IMAP) and thus is only a very small part of what is needed.
the resources that i think are of interest are emails, meta-data about emails, collections of emails and meta-data about collections of emails. these concepts already have natural correspondents in HTTP and WebDAV smooth operation means being able to feed information about changes back to the client which needs a little more thought - robert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
