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At this point, JMAP is like Duke Nukem Forever or Winds of Winter. Why does email need JSON over HTTP? IMAP might not be the sexiest protocol, but it serves hun

by elric 4y ago

At this point, JMAP is like Duke Nukem Forever or Winds of Winter. Why does email need JSON over HTTP? IMAP might not be the sexiest protocol, but it serves hundreds of millions of users just fine. JMAP, on the other hand, is hardly used, and it doesn't seem to solve any issues that users face, which means demand is never likely to reach critical mass.

epilys 4y ago
Because it was designed for webmail frontends, which can communicate with servers from the client side.
tracker1 4y ago
Well, if using the system... it makes serialization far less complex in terms of normalization. You can serialize/deserialize through what have become relatively standard libraries for pretty much every language under the sun. This can be utilized in/out of class/record based representations of the data in your language of choice, and acted upon directly. The use of HTTP is as sensible as anything else, as the HTTP actions and paths align relatively well to resource endpoints as well as a text based protocol. The abstractions and libraries available make this easier... if you look at IMAP it's byzantine by comparison.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
The biggest issue with IMAP is that writing a quality client for it that works on all possible permutations of the spec (especially with the botched Gmail IMAP implementation in the mix) is a huge, huge pain in the rear which is why there's a dearth of high quality FOSS mail clients… you've got the old standbys like Thunderbird and Claws and that's about it. Newer clients like Geary either die on the vine or get stuck in a somewhat spartan state because making it more full-featured takes knowhow, time, and manpower that's not generally available. On the other hand lots of devs know how to work with JSON-over-HTTP APIs and a lot of modern languages even come with JSON serialization/deserialization out of the box, with makes writing quality clients a lot more accessible to a lot more people.

by elric 4y ago

epilys 4y ago

Because it was designed for webmail frontends, which can communicate with servers from the client side.

tracker1 4y ago

Well, if using the system... it makes serialization far less complex in terms of normalization. You can serialize/deserialize through what have become relatively standard libraries for pretty much every language under the sun. This can be utilized in/out of class/record based representations of the data in your language of choice, and acted upon directly. The use of HTTP is as sensible as anything else, as the HTTP actions and paths align relatively well to resource endpoints as well as a text based protocol. The abstractions and libraries available make this easier... if you look at IMAP it's byzantine by comparison.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

The biggest issue with IMAP is that writing a quality client for it that works on all possible permutations of the spec (especially with the botched Gmail IMAP implementation in the mix) is a huge, huge pain in the rear which is why there's a dearth of high quality FOSS mail clients… you've got the old standbys like Thunderbird and Claws and that's about it. Newer clients like Geary either die on the vine or get stuck in a somewhat spartan state because making it more full-featured takes knowhow, time, and manpower that's not generally available. On the other hand lots of devs know how to work with JSON-over-HTTP APIs and a lot of modern languages even come with JSON serialization/deserialization out of the box, with makes writing quality clients a lot more accessible to a lot more people.