Puzzled

[Charles]

I like the kind of projects like Zimbra. I was active in the past in other webmail communities such as Uebimiau (Not the same audience, I know!), but I found Zimbra quite a heavy and complicated project. I think using JSP is overkilled, for an enterprise application I would have used maybe Python, but JSP is heavy for the server, and requires 5x more code
I read the documentation (PDF) of Zimbra, and it seems that we'll need a steep learning curve to play around with the API, framework, etc...
The source code is really a lot. I think you could have built a very nice web application based aggressively on AJAX + Python/PHP with less code. But in the end, Zimbra is quite revolutionary, it will attract at least a lot of attention.
Just my opinion

[KevinH]

Thanks for the note Charles. A couple mis-conceptions though. Of all the code in Zimbra the JSP code is less than a 1/100 of 1% (or .01%). There are less than 10 JSP files used in the production deployment. Each is use simple to boot strap the Javascript and generate a tiny bit of HTML for the login page. The entire client application is Javascript (or AJAX). It's downloaded to the browser once at start-up and that's it. The rest of the time it's simply XML/SOAP calls to our backend server which is written in 100% Java.

As engineers we are pretty excited to be able to release a beta of an open source project with documentation. Let alone the size/scope of Zimbra, having documentation at all this early in a project is very rare. Regardless if you find something confusing or not clear enough please let us know. Our documentation team would love the feedback. It's the only way we can improve in the future

[Charles]

Yes Kevin, I thought that at least you have a professional organization in every aspect, as you said, most open-source projects lack quality documentation in the begining. You don't.

I'll keep reviewing your code, as I find it interesting because I myself use xmlHttpRequest in the applications we develop where I work

Good luck