[Freedombox-discuss] imap <-> http proxy? was Re: email recommendations?

[Thomas Lord]

On Sun, 2011-02-27 at 22:17 -0500, Dave Crossland wrote:
> On 27 February 2011 15:37, Thomas Lord <lord at emf.net> wrote:
> >
> > Are there (that you know of) any Web MUAs that, by design,
> > more "API-centric"?
> 
> Node.JS and CoffeeScript to the rescue?

One way or another it is looking like something that 
unfortunately would have to be written to be used
for Freedombox.

My goal here is to reduce the most basic communications
and social networking capabilities to a small set 
of fundamental services implemented very flexibly - 
and then have an ecosystem of pluggable web clients
that exist on top of that just statically served.

For example, consider a "private message" feature
in a client that provides a Facebook-style interface
and an ordinary web mail client.   Ideally, the underlying
dynamic server-side app for both is nothing more than 
an ordinary IMAP server with some thin-as-practical
HTTP API glue on top of it.   (It can't be too thin.
Web clients need help parsing messages, handling
attachments, etc.)   Ideally, the clients are 
otherwise served up static and the APIs are well enough 
defined that users can have a choice of clients and
client authors can compete -- all against the
same fundamental services on the back end.

More on this later but the gap in imap<->http
is the first big "missing piece" I've found.  Plenty
more places to look for missing pieces, though :-)

-t