Mailing List Archive: Catalyst: Users

[SOT] cat webmail app?

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jlmartinez-lists-catalyst at capside

Aug 21, 2008, 9:03 AM

Post #26 of 29 (479 views)
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Re: [SOT] cat webmail app? [In reply to]

Roderick A. Anderson escribió:

> Well I fell into a pit and had a tough time escaping.

I've been on vacation. I tried to post with nabble, but the message
didn't get to the list :(

>
> Where are /we/ on this? Name: Catmail? List: exist? Repo: exist?
> irc:exist? Needed: Me? (for more than being an agitator.)
>
> Jose. I think I saw a message that you had got some code donated(?).

Yup. I think that the code is in your hands right now, too.

Matt: please open the list, when possible. catmail seems quite accepted.

>
> All. I am working on two other projects that will use Catalyst but I've
> been away from development (using cat anyway) for quite awhile so I'm
> liable to ask some pretty lame questions.
>
> So does anyone have a preferred module set to deal with IMAP and why?
> One of my projects mentioned above uses IMAP and I found there are a lot
> of options ... A lot!
>
> Some seem more complete, several have very cryptic methods, many relied
> on a previous knowledge of the supporting modules and the documentation
> was lacking or vague. I think a lot of problems I ran into was my lack
> of experience with IMAP as more than a user.
>

Please comment the pros and cons of the modules that you have had
experience with, and which one you think is more suited for a webmail app.

> So enough rambling on. What next?

I think that we have to select an IMAP module from CPAN and make it a
Catalyst Model so the webmail can grow on top of it.

Jose Luis Martinez
jlmartinez [at] capside

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dbix-class at trout

Aug 22, 2008, 7:44 AM

Post #27 of 29 (474 views)
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Re: [SOT] cat webmail app? [In reply to]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 02:14:41PM -0500, Andrew Kornak wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 10:48 +0100, Matt S Trout wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 08, 2008 at 05:47:25PM -0500, Andrew Kornak wrote:
> > > http://www.webmin.com/usermin.html
> > >
> > > Not Cat based but is a fairly complete perl-based, modular, extensible
> > > solution as well as a useful system administration tool. I have used
> > > Webmin and Usermin for many years and highly recommend both.
> >
> > How does that remotely relate to webmail?
> >
>
> As per the web sites I included, Usermin has a fairly complete mail
> module that integrates with spam/virus filters and offers many options
> regarding your mail delivery agent. Webmin and Usermin are BSD-like
> licensed and offer RPM. DEB, and tar source packages. I thought it might
> be a useful starting point or even a reference since it is written
> entirely in perl and is a very mature and well supported project.

Ok. I last looked at webmin about three years ago and it was an appallingly
badly written pile of hacks that just happened to work, and had no webmail
related component at all.

For the sake of us poor stupid people, maybe next time include a more
specific link and some explanation of why that link's in there :)

--
Matt S Trout Need help with your Catalyst or DBIx::Class project?
Technical Director http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/catalyst/
Shadowcat Systems Ltd. Want a managed development or deployment platform?
http://chainsawblues.vox.com/ http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/servers/

_______________________________________________
List: Catalyst [at] lists
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joe at virtualmin

Aug 22, 2008, 12:38 PM

Post #28 of 29 (469 views)
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Re: [SOT] cat webmail app? [In reply to]

Matt S Trout wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 02:14:41PM -0500, Andrew Kornak wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 10:48 +0100, Matt S Trout wrote:
>>> On Fri, Aug 08, 2008 at 05:47:25PM -0500, Andrew Kornak wrote:
>>>> http://www.webmin.com/usermin.html
>>>>
>>>> Not Cat based but is a fairly complete perl-based, modular, extensible
>>>> solution as well as a useful system administration tool. I have used
>>>> Webmin and Usermin for many years and highly recommend both.
>>> How does that remotely relate to webmail?
>>>
>> As per the web sites I included, Usermin has a fairly complete mail
>> module that integrates with spam/virus filters and offers many options
>> regarding your mail delivery agent. Webmin and Usermin are BSD-like
>> licensed and offer RPM. DEB, and tar source packages. I thought it might
>> be a useful starting point or even a reference since it is written
>> entirely in perl and is a very mature and well supported project.
>
> Ok. I last looked at webmin about three years ago and it was an appallingly
> badly written pile of hacks that just happened to work, and had no webmail
> related component at all.

Correction: It's an appallingly badly written pile of hacks that just
happens to work on millions of production systems every single day.

I think we'd all like to have started a project that is as popular as
Webmin. (~2 million downloads per year, just from SourceForge.)

Just for reference, Usermin (the project he linked to, which is the
webmail and user-oriented variant of Webmin) has been around for about 7
years. It's an extremely full-featured mail client, if a little clunky
in the UI (I'm working on that). It's not as popular as SquirrelMail,
because it requires a root-level installation, but it's definitely more
powerful.

It'd probably be wise to think of Webmin/Usermin in context: It is an 11
year old project with ~450,000 lines of code, written almost entirely by
*one guy* (as a hobby a good deal of that time), that has to run on
systems with very old Perl versions. And, because it is used in
hundreds of embedded devices and commercial products, the standard API
simply cannot change. There are 114 standard modules (last time I
counted), and several hundred third party modules, and Webmin has never
broken backward compatibility for those modules. A module written 10
years ago will work, unmodified, in last weeks Webmin release (it won't
participate in logging or ACLs or notifications, but it'll work as well
as it did 10 years ago).

So, sure, it's got some old-fashioned Perl code that hasn't seen a major
overhaul in many years (Perl 4-isms abound, even), but it's not bad
code. Perhaps it is unfamiliar looking, if you've been working with
modern OO Perl style...but it's not particularly bad. Quite concise and
clear, mostly, if a bit quirky. And, of course, with several million
users banging on it every day, it's pretty damned well-tested.

We also accept patches. (Assuming they don't break backward
compatibility and they work on Perl 5.005_4 and up.)

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dbix-class at trout

Aug 25, 2008, 11:33 AM

Post #29 of 29 (439 views)
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Re: [SOT] cat webmail app? [In reply to]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 12:38:14PM -0700, Joe Cooper wrote:
> Matt S Trout wrote:
> >Ok. I last looked at webmin about three years ago and it was an appallingly
> >badly written pile of hacks that just happened to work, and had no webmail
> >related component at all.
>
> Correction: It's an appallingly badly written pile of hacks that just
> happens to work on millions of production systems every single day.

That's not a correction. It doesn't disagree with my statement at all.

I've happily used webmin, and would install it tomorrow rather than trying
to roll my own for that purpose. I told the guys working on it pretty much
that at YAPC::NA this year - I'm awful at names so I don't know if you
were one of the people involved in that conversation though.

> It'd probably be wise to think of Webmin/Usermin in context: It is an 11
> year old project with ~450,000 lines of code, written almost entirely by
> *one guy* (as a hobby a good deal of that time), that has to run on
> systems with very old Perl versions. And, because it is used in
> hundreds of embedded devices and commercial products, the standard API
> simply cannot change. There are 114 standard modules (last time I
> counted), and several hundred third party modules, and Webmin has never
> broken backward compatibility for those modules. A module written 10
> years ago will work, unmodified, in last weeks Webmin release (it won't
> participate in logging or ACLs or notifications, but it'll work as well
> as it did 10 years ago).

Which is a fantastic feat of engineering, and the authors should be
bloody proud of themselves for it. But:

That does -not- mean that the codebase is a good one to start off with
when trying to develop a pluggable catalyst application that can be
easily re-used and extended within other applications, which is why I
brushed it off as not seeming particularly relevant to this conversation.

So if you took my comments as being an insult, or something you needed to
defend against, I'm sorry. I'll take stable, hateful crappy code that works
over beautiful code that doesn't do what I want any day, and I'm sure I've
written even crappier code that's still around somewhere. There's certainly
bits of my work on DBIC and Catalyst that I also consider crap, and would be
just as worried about people taking as an example to work from.

Hope that clears up any misunderstanding - I didn't bother listing the
caveats in my original post because I figured as developers we'd all been
there and we all understood it, but it's perhaps worthwhile my having spelt
it out anyway.

--
Matt S Trout Need help with your Catalyst or DBIx::Class project?
Technical Director http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/catalyst/
Shadowcat Systems Ltd. Want a managed development or deployment platform?
http://chainsawblues.vox.com/ http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/servers/

_______________________________________________
List: Catalyst [at] lists
Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst
Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst [at] lists/
Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/

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