Zimlet as separate component

[archiem]

Zimlet is a neat architecture concept. But presently it's available only along with ZCS. Since per the guide -

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While the Zimlet Specification was designed for the Zimbra
Collaboration Suite, the model could be easily be generalized for other Web 2.0/AJAX user interfaces.
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I think it would be useful to make it available as a separately downladable component under a flexible license such as done for ZTK. Are there any plans for doing so? If yes, any timeline thought of so far?

[KevinH]

Not sure what you'd pick to expose or how we'd extract it from Zimbra. What pieces are you interested in? Server? UI? JavaScript API's? Maybe a use case on how you'd expect to use it would help.

[archiem]

Not sure what you'd pick to expose or how we'd extract it from Zimbra. What pieces are you interested in? Server? UI? JavaScript API's? Maybe a use case on how you'd expect to use it would help.

Let me provide the case around what we have and like to do.

We have the messaging backend and also evaluating building our own UI using ZTK. On the UI front we are considering building the layouts, control logic and certain level of trivial integration. But for
i) inter communication among various modules such as calendar, mail, contacts, IM; taking example as displaying mini-calendar on getting a focus on date text field
ii) allowing to plug 3rd party modules that be able to integrate with existing modules e.g. wiki or blogs added to messaging solution (which need not be part of basic solution)

we would like to have a framework/platform on which various integration points or services be developed so that application need not under go release updates all the time. Also, community support who could create and provide some useful REST kind of services saving us time would be the best scenario.

Going through the documentation, I found zimlets to be such a framework (please correct me if am wrong). The components that are required to create a new service (whether that is for an inter-app communication or 3rd party integration) comprises of
- declarative xml file (found content-object to be quite independent)
- JS files (as well as css/images)
- java handler class(es)
- taglibs
- config files

Now out of the above, I am not clear what parts are dependent on ZCS (runtime??, deployment dependencies??). If most of the above can be used independently with says technologies (LDAP)and servers (webservers, messaging servers) other than provided as part of ZCS then how we can only get those?

[KevinH]

Ok I understand. To separate out the parts of Zimlets you need would not be too hard, for the basic things but some of the advanced features like ACL's, priority require back end support. We don't plan to split out and deliver Zimlets as a separate technology bundle at the moment. Starting with the ZCS itself it seems possible to do what you'd need.