Zimbra Jar Caching...

[JoshuaPrismon]

I don't know if any of the Zimbra people have seen this yet:
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/02...h-firefox.html
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/offlinezimbra/

I know that the Zimbra folks are at work with their own off line approach for remote syncing, but there was another interesting technology mentioned here. Jar caching. Zimbra's startup time (esp loading the javascript) is the biggest problem that a lot of people have with Zimbra. Has anyone investigated if it's reasonable to group the compressed js's together in a jar file and serve it that way to speed up fetches/make it possible to just hit Zimbra without any downloading of the javascript?

I also was looking at the firefox extension that one of the zimbra guys did. I wonder if there are any tricks we can play in a firefox extension to make zimbra faster.

Anyone else have any ideas?

[doublec]

Originally Posted by lostknight

Has anyone investigated if it's reasonable to group the compressed js's together in a jar file and serve it that way to speed up fetches/make it possible to just hit Zimbra without any downloading of the javascript?

The Jar file approach did seem to result in faster load times but I didn't do any actual timing - just from the feel of it. I'll put some timing code in today and see what difference it makes. In practice I doubt it has much speed improvements over bundling all the javascript in a single file but it'll be interesting to see.

I should warn that although Jar URL's work in Firefox 2 they resulted in a big slowdown of the load time if there were a large number of includes from the jar. In the trunk build of Firefox this is not an issue.

[JoshuaPrismon]

Originally Posted by doublec

The Jar file approach did seem to result in faster load times but I didn't do any actual timing - just from the feel of it. I'll put some timing code in today and see what difference it makes. In practice I doubt it has much speed improvements over bundling all the javascript in a single file but it'll be interesting to see.

I should warn that although Jar URL's work in Firefox 2 they resulted in a big slowdown of the load time if there were a large number of includes from the jar. In the trunk build of Firefox this is not an issue.

Great stuff. I am glad to see the mozilla people taking a look at Zimbra for testing new technology. I think that's a pretty good app for a testbed ;-) I'm not sure this approach will scale to huge mailboxes (mine is about 1.2GB for example) or how you would implement things like live search, but it's still interesting.

[doublec]

I'm not sure this approach will scale to huge mailboxes (mine is about 1.2GB for example) or how you would implement things like live search, but it's still interesting.

The approach I've taken for the demo is to allow selection of the emails that you want accessible offline. Hopefully that wouldn't be the whole 1.2GB! Another approach might be to have a particular folder, like the inbox, that is always accessible offline. In my case that probably wouldn't work since my gmail inbox is 2,000 messages - I can't keep up!

The use case would be something like, receive your mail before you need to go on a flight, or otherwise be offline. Mark those you want available to read or reply to. Go offline. Read/Edit emails. When you can go back online, send what you wrote and unmark those you don't need online anymore (or move them out of the inbox).