-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi Ed,
On 2010-03-05 19:18, Ed W wrote: > Go on... Why's that..? > > Weight of history defines that we do things in certain ways and we > sometimes get stuck in a bit of a rut, but if M$ has shown us one thing > it's that we should (cautiously) look at how disparate systems can be > integrated into a cohesive whole (granted they also showed how you can > make an insecure system also, but I think that's an optional problem). > > Not a dig at Dovecot, but: many software projects overlook the > opportunity to integrate with other systems and become larger than the > individual pieces. An example in point would be that I'm sitting here > battling with SNMP + Cacti + Nagios trying to get them all to talk to > each other... There has to be a reason Groundworks charges so much for > selling you a package where this is already done... > > Spinning off at a tangent, but I fell in love with (the concept of) > Lotus Notes some 18 years ago. The way I saw it was a massive > distributed multi-master data store + some presentation layers which > could make any database look like whatever you wanted it to look like. > I used it for: > - Email inbox > - Calendar > - Project documentation, discussion and design > - Staff holiday tracking > - Recruitment workflow (track all candidate details, results of > interviews, contact correspondence, etc) > - Loads of inhouse custom one off projects > > I also used it as an SQL database (with a bit of magic) and built an > application used to handle billions of £s of financing for a UK bank. > The IRA blew up one of the banks offices (which kind of stopped the > server working so well), all the staff simply changed their Notes tel > number to that of a different office and just carried on as though > nothing had happened... No data lost, work carried on > > I had naively assumed that IMAP servers would head down the same road... > To my eye it's all just unstructured data and I really don't see what's > so special about a CalDev server or an SMTP server which makes it > anything other than a plugin to "an unstructured data store". > > If anyone starts to buy that idea then lift your vision and imagine that > we start to see all these just distributed databases, specialist > interfaces to query them efficiently and a bunch of protocols to > distribute documents between the databases - personally I would then > vote we start to shift to some kind of jabber style protocol to connect > all these datastores together. Once you head down that road you can > imagine perhaps an MMS style storage model where the sender hosts all > the mail storage and just sends a short "SMS" note to the recipient to > let them know an email is waiting for them. (possibly even has some > small positive anti-spam benefit...) ... kind of reminds me of Wave. I see a huge potential in Wave, once they get the federation part and some other details right. :) Patrick. - -- STAR Software (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. http://www.star-group.net/ Phone: +86 (21) 3462 7688 x 826 Fax: +86 (21) 3462 7779 PGP key E883A005 https://stshacom1.star-china.net/keys/patrick_nagel.asc Fingerprint: E09A D65E 855F B334 E5C3 5386 EF23 20FC E883 A005 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkuUXWAACgkQ7yMg/OiDoAWTiwCfd1ew65Ts//JWcwku1neRzky7 5tkAoI4hxcOmebn/FtQ5U67HRKOb1Oya =pqHA -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
