Port Zimbra Calendar/Mail Client to .Net

[stephenlane80]

Hello Developers,

I have an interesting proposition to make regarding Zimbra and .Net. What i am suggestion is to make a simplified .Net mail/calendar application that uses the zimbra javascript interface, please take a look here and let me know what you think,

Also can a zimbra employee let me know i this is allowed by the zimbra open source contract,

Thanks

Steve

[dijichi2]

Hi Steve

Well, although to some degree I appreciate and agree with your musings, I think it unlikely you're going to get much cooperation from the company Zimbra With regards to your comments about the full vs opensource edition, actually the opensource edition is fully functioning, very feature rich product, it's just missing some of the 'enterprise' features such as Outlook and Mobile support, and hot backup. The core product is mostly fully intact. I understand your reticence over contributions, I think it's a big reason there aren't more contributors including myself, although once you understand a bit more how zimbra works it's difficult to see how it could work otherwise. There are major upsides to how they have it setup.

Couple of stumbling blocks for your project I can think of:

1) Why on earth?! C#? Really? Now I am totally ignorant of C#/.NET but isn't is just largely rebranded VB? Now that I have used in the past and my word what a piece of junk. Seriously though, what are you trying to accomplish?

2) The opensource version / source code has 'brandware' licensing - you must keep the logo intact in the interface at all times, even in a derivative product (although it's slightly different logo).

3) The web interface is written to talk to Zimbra API. To make this work you would either have to translate these calls to standard IMAP/Caldav etc, or translate the Zimbra Java backend to .Net. Unless you have a huge dev team behind you there's no way in a billion years this will happen - it's a huge codebase and such is the pace of it's development you'd spend your life re-translating all that development into .Net.

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding what you're asking, just offering my 2c.

[stephenlane80]

Hi dijichi,

Thansk for you observations, i think we are mostly on the same page except for a couple of items !!

In terms of the java/.Net argument we could be here all night, java is an excellent platfrom and most of all it is free, however, since the begining of .Net everything is compiled to MSIL (think bytecode) and interpreted by a runtime similar to the JVM. So whether you code in c# or vb it is all complied into identical MSIL which in interpreted at ruintime. I agree that the vb 6 and before was a crock, but .Net is a different beastie.. Blow for blow there isnt a lot of difference between c# 2.0 and java 5 IMHO.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of c# developers out here, and one of of the key deciders for them i think is the ease in which c# can interoperate with com and the windows api. Now if you operate primarily on any of the nix type system thats a different story !!

So in terms of what i am thinking about for the c# app, i am not proposing to rewrtie zimbra using c#, what i am suggesting thou is to take the zimbra javascript ui technology and use it for a simple mail/calendar application.

As you suggest the java developers that are involved in the zimbra community will likely not have an interest in this, but this is aimed at .Net developers that may be looking around here thinking, wow it would be nice to have this javescript technology available for the .Net community !!

Cheers

Steve