MAR
1
2009
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How services change the application landscapeWhile working through my backlog of articles on Planet GNOME on my way to Nuremberg (yes, again), I came across a blog entry of Philip Van Hoof. In it he asserts that soon the era of email clients will be over, which I think some people misinterpreted as application for reading and managing email messages becoming obsolete. However, what I think he intended to say and what he tried to explain in the following paragraphs, is that monolithic, end-to-end functionality, clients will be succeeded by applications specialized in displaying, creating and editing PIM data such as emails, but that other tasks like fetching emails from servers, filtering, etc. will be offloaded to services specialized in those domains. Until now applicaton developers had to consider distracting isuses like how to get emails from servers, different protocols and capabilities of these servers, how to store the downloaded messages locally, how to search through potentially huge amounts of headers and message bodies, etc. Since Philip's blog entry focuses on the search and filtering part, so I'll add the missing info about the data access and transferring bits. From now on application developers can fully concentrate on how to present data to the users, how to let the users interact with it, etc. Spezialized Akonadi clients, called resources, will take care of transferring data from servers and local storage. End user applications which only want to work on a subset of the vast amount of a user's PIM data can then ask the search service to tell them which data items they'll have to look at and get only those items from Akonadi. Akonadi will then make sure to get the item data from whereever it is currently stored or from the cache if it is still available there. Perfect cooperation across projects through a service based approach! |
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Comments
Soon the era of email clients will be over
I was just wondering what you thought the benefit would be for using a dedicated client over a Ajax gui in a browser for PIM tasks.
Pro's for Clients
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Data security may be one (as most if you are using imap there is benefit there)
The interface is styled like other desktop tools.
Nepomuk integration would have been one but with a plugin like google desktop tools have this is not an issue.
Offline work may have been an issue but I think google gears and alike addresses that.
Pro's for Ajax GUI's
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The client you use is the same whichever machine you use.
You don't have to waste HD space.
You don't have to waste processor time and memory running a GUI (this does make a difference on a weaker machine).
In google's case search is excellent (tag's aren't necessarily interpreted as folders but can be used to combine for complex searches).
For me the web based clients win. am I missing something?
Re: Soon the era of email clients will be over
Lets see.
Full Clients:
+ Can verify and create digital signatures
+ Can en- and decrypt messages
+ Can do automated tasks like archiving mails above a certain age
+ Work in high-latency or low-bandwidth scenarios
+ Can integrate with other services such as IM presence status
+ Can use notifications (e.g. passive popups)
Assuming a reasonable implementation
+ Allow you to switch if you find another UI or feature set fitting your needs better
Offline work may have been an issue but I think google gears and alike addresses that.
No idea, haven't used that yet. How does it synchronize local and remote changes?
You don't have to waste HD space.
You mean for the executable and its configs?
You don't have to waste processor time and memory running a GUI (this does make a difference on a weaker machine).
Interesting. How do you read the mails without UI?
Or do you compare with accessing through a text console browser?
For me the web based clients win. am I missing something?
No, don't think so. If you can live with the inherent limitations, it might be the better solution for your use cases.