From schaffer@informatik.uni-muenchen.de Thu Sep 23 13:17:52 1999 Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 12:18:16 +0200 (CEST) From: Sebastian Schaffert To: webmail@woanders.de Subject: WebMail v0.6 will be released this week Subject says it. I'll explain (and discuss) some of the new features here: 1. Redesign of the Object Structure ----------------------------------- This won't touch those of you that simply *run* WebMail, but it is a big change for those who want to develop in/with WebMail. WebMail has become much more modular. Many of the Classes have splitted and I have tried to apply many of the patterns used for proper OO software engineering (mainly "low coupling", "high cohesion"). Thus it should be somewhat easier to develop for WebMail. 1.1 Plugins Part of this is also the new Plugin concept. WebMail has now a path that is searched for "plugins" (i.e. classes that implement the special interface "Plugin"). These plugins are all "singletons" and initialized on startup (solving dependencies if necessary with a simple dependency tree structure). There are some types of special Plugins, one of them can register for a own URL on the WebMail server for example. Many of the main WebMail parts have been converted into plugins to lighten the somewhat bloated WebMailSession class. Also, the authenticators are now plugins that can be easily added or removed. The plugins allow for much easier addition of features (like an addressbook I already have in mind). 1.2 Configuration Scheme The configuration scheme is no longer "up to the admin" (can set any variable to any setting), but WebMail has a new scheme where plugins and other program parts can register for a certain configuration parameter that may take only certain values. 1.3 Translation Translating WebMail should have become easier, as you don't have to recompile WebMail to translate the templates. Also WebMail now automatically recognizes (and adds) installed languages (no need to specify in the configuration). 1.4 Directory structure The directory structure got somewhat more split up, and things are where they should be in the directory tree. 1.5 Developer documentation WebMail now contains some documentation intended for developers (or other people interested in how things actually work in WebMail). This is only partly finished, especially the class diagram is not at all finished. 2. Performance increase ----------------------- I did some work on performance issues and now the WebMail HTTP server comes closer to standard HTTP servers (about 350 req/second on a Enterprise 450, 2xUltraSPARC, static GIF image - before it was about 100 req/second, hey, we now beat Roxen!). This is mainly due to a new asynchronous logging thread that accepts log messages in a queue and then writes them to the logfile from time to time (but immediatley writes everything if it receives a message of type ERROR or CRITICAL). WebMail connections used to have to wait for the logfile to be written until they could serve the request. Another improvement (for speed) is the use of a tree structure to handle URL requests instead of a simple list of "if-then-else". 3. New configuration interface ------------------------------ This is most likely a thing that will please many administrators: WebMail now has a webbased configuration interface (that can be accessed with http://server:port/admin) where all configuration settings may be changed and users may be added/edited/deleted. Also, you can monitor the currently active sessions there (and kill them if necessary). This will very likely replace the telnet administration interface soon. Another thing regarding configuration: the WebMail configuration file is now stored in plain text and may be easily edited with your favorite editor (There are some restrictions, though, that you can read of in the README). The Swing administration client has now been completely dropped. 4. New languages ---------------- Thanks to Rafa Couto, WebMail will include Spanish and Galician language packages in v0.6. 5. JDK ------ JDK 1.2 is recommended for WebMail 0.6. I will try it on JDK 1.1, however. 6. Release ---------- I will release WebMail v0.6 until the end of this week, perhaps even earlier. Many bugs that you have reported me are fixed in this release (and messages now can be forwarded!). Also I have fixed some potential memory problems on large installations. That won't affect you however if you have less than around a hundred users. Most likely it is not bug free however and some bugs may have been introduced during the redesign. -- Sebastian Schaffert ***************************************************************************** * Sebastian Schaffert schaffer@informatik.uni-muenchen.de * * Rechnerbetriebsgruppe 089-2178-2137 * * Institut für Informatik Oettingenstraße 67 * * LMU München 80538 München * *****************************************************************************