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Roundcube Next - a survey
by Thomas Bruederli 22 Mar '15

22 Mar '15

Dear developers and list lurkers The Roundcube project will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year and a decade is just right to stop for a while and let your thoughts flow into new directions. Some of you may already have read my random thoughts [1] about the future or Roundcube development and since I wrote this down, the idea of a fresh new successor to Roundcube has settled in my mind and won't go away that easily. The initial responses on that were exclusively positive and this encourages us to take it one step further now. Meanwhile I looked into many other applications, libraries, frameworks, apis and programming languages to find the best set of tools that would form a new top-noch webmail application for the next decade. A loose and admittedly rather limited collection has manifested on a wiki page [2] already. The primary goal of rethinking Roundcube and webmail in general is certainly to improve the user experience for everyday communication. The second important aspect (at least for me as a developer) is to have a slick, structured and flexible framework to build new features and applications on top of. The current Roundcube codebase comes with a variety of technological and conceptual constraints which rule the ongoing development in a rather negative manner. Therefore thinking of a successor that is completely independent and unrelated to the current software stack is a tempting exercise which I'd like to invite you to. As already outlined in the blog post [1], the new Roundcube should move most of the application logic from the server to the client. Browsers are way more capable than they've been 10 years ago and times of server-side template rendering are definitely over. Those who are familiar with the Roundcube codebase will immediately understand that such a change in paradigms also means a complete break of compatibility with all existing components of Roundcube, including plugins. So let's free our mind from what we know about Roundcube and start over. This can even go as far as choosing something else than PHP for the server part which is supposed to be reduced to a simple wrapper for data exchange between the backend storage (IMAP et al) and the client application. Possible candidates are PHP (still), Python, Node.js. At least these are the ones I'm currently familiar with. So let's take a deeper look into these as I'm particularly interested in your opinions, also from a deployment and hosting perspective. * PHP The major disadvantage of PHP that has become evident in Roundcube is its short process lifetime requiring a full startup, database and IMAP connection+authentication and closing all connections again for every single HTTP request. Even FPM and persistent socket connections (which IMO are still unreliable and should be avoided) don't really help to overcome this. The advantage of sticking with PHP certainly is that we can re-use some of the existing parts from the Roundcube codebase, such as the IMAP library, the plugin infrastructure etc. And in terms of deployment: PHP is everywhere and lots of sysadmins are familiar with deploying and maintaing and tweaking PHP applications. * Python Although Python isn't perfect for running as long-term processes either, there are some well developed frameworks out there (e.g. Twisted or Flask) which could be used to manage persistent connections between the client (think websockets) and storage backends. In addition to that, its easier to implement reactive applications with an asynchronous architecture. Regarding deployment: the Python universe has some well established package repositories which make installation and deployment pretty easy. From a sysadmin point of view, I have no idea how easy or painful the maintenance of Python applications is. But the number of hosting providers offering Python is certainly lower that for PHP. * Node.js The new star on the web app sky. Its architecture seems to make node.js perfect for long-living server processes and maximum throughput. Although we could use Javascript, which we're all familiar with, the number of pitfalls to use that for server applications is quite high. The learning curve here shouldn't be underestimated. And opinions certainly go into two distinct directions when in comes to deploying and scaling node applications. Installation should come easy as there's basically only npm for all the package management and everybody doing node is familiar with that. OK, so question #1: what's your take on the programming language choice? The client part luckily doesn't need such a decision as there's only Javascript for this. But the variety of ways how to build a single-page web application and the number of frameworks helping you to do this is mind-boggling. I have to admit that in this regard, I'm one of the old fashioned web developers from the late 90ies and yet have to learn a lot about the brave new world of web development. I guess we can all agree that nobody wants to build a new web application framework from scratch as we did for Roundcube due to the lack of sophisticated solutions back in 2005. But choosing the right tools might be essential for the timeline and the success of Roundcube Next. So here's question #2: what are your favorite javascript application libraries and frameworks? What experience did you make let's say with Angular or Backbone? What are the pitfalls? Finally another big challenge we have when aiming to create the perfect webmail application is the way we make the client and the server talk together. We should carefully draft a proper data model and an according protocol for this. For the data model, I already tried to create a first draft in regards of what we already know the application should be capable of. This includes multi-account support, tagging, sharing and the extensibility for calendaring and other groupware-like tasks. For the client-server communication, there are some interesting concepts out there but none of them actually seems to suit the purpose we're after. They either lack the concept of sharing (i.e. ACL) or do not account for collections such as multiple different address books one account my have access to. The candidates I'm referring to are: Nilas.com (former InboxApp), JMAP (by Fastmail) or the Gmail API (also to be supported by Dovecot). All are good approaches and generally point into the same direction but I couldn't say that one of them would already solve the use-cases we want to cover in Roundcube. And yes, we're seeking for a protocol and not an API [3] :-) And this is question #3: who's willing to help us draft the perfect protocol for this? I guess this should be a highly collaborative and iterative process and I'm keen on any input from people who are experienced with this type of task. Thank you all for reading and participating in this survey. I'm really excited to move this forward. All free and open source of course! Best, Thomas [1] https://roundcubeinbox.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/roundcube-next-if-we-would-… [2] http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Roundcube_Next [3] https://vimeo.com/71278954

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Update 1.1.1 released
by Thomas Bruederli 19 Mar '15

19 Mar '15

Dear Roundcube users We're proud to announce the first service release to the stable version 1.1 of Roundcube webmail. It contains some important bug fixes and improvements in error handling as well as a few new features and configuration options. See the full Changelog here: http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Changelog It's considered stable and we recommend to update all productive installations of Roundcube with this version. Download it from http://roundcube.net/download. And remember: backup before you update! Kind regards, Thomas

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Re: [RCD] Problem with rcube_imap_cache. (Rodrigo Santellan)
by Rodrigo Santellan 18 Mar '15

18 Mar '15

A.L.E.C, I just doing validation of the variables are set or no. There are so many things yet that I don't understand how are created on roundcube but little by little I'm refactoring some pieces so it can work with a more restrictive warning and error mode. My work is here https://github.com/rsantellan/symfony2-maith-roundcube I know it a real work in progress but so far I'm having better response times that with my last implementation (pure php imap). Thanks for the help!

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Problem with rcube_imap_cache.
by Rodrigo Santellan 17 Mar '15

17 Mar '15

Hi, I'm trying to decoupling a little bit the roundcube base to use in a project. My problem is that running roundcube in console with only the framework works like a charm but when I try to put in a Symfony2 project I have undefined $index on rcube_imap_cache. The line is this: $this->add_index_row($mailbox, $sort_field, $data, $mbox_data, $exists, $index['modseq']); On the method: function get_index($mailbox, $sort_field = null, $sort_order = null, $existing = false) My problem is that I cannot find where $index is defined. Where is that property is constructed? Regards.

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RC session terminated every few minutes...?
by Michael Heydekamp 10 Mar '15

10 Mar '15

Hi, currently my Roundcube session is being terminated every few minutes, so I have to type this message pretty fast. ;) Roundcube Webmail 1.2-git [GIT 20150306.1906] Ist this a (known) Roundcube issue...? Cheers, -- Michael Heydekamp Co-Admin freexp.de Düsseldorf/Germany

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Fwd: Re: Roundcube Next - a survey
by Hans de Raad 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

Hi Thomas, first of all, many thanks for the great software you and the other RC communitymembers have provided me with in the past years. It has been an absolute pleasure using it and I have a lot of very satisfied customers thankfully using it on a daily basis as well. With regards to your questions: #1: what's your take on the programming language choice? >From a hosting perspective, currently nothing beats PHP. However PHP does have its drawbacks mostly related to shared hosting environments using old versions (which are a real PITA). >From a developer perspective, for backend web development modern PHP is just as suitable for just about any project as Python, Ruby or even Java. So when selecting a programming language of choice in my projects my first priority would be developer familiarity with the language and the status of the frameworks avaiable in it. And from that perspective, PHP has quite a lot going for it. Frameworks like Symfony 2 are very mature and versatile (even huge projects like Drupal are moving towards leveraging their power). Also with modern theming engines like Twig, separating layout and business logic is very mature. Performance wise, for most projects PHP is good enough, especially since mostly the performance bottlenecks aren't in the webserver (or PHP parser/engine) but in the database/storage behind it. But, that said, there are valid alternatives and NodeJS is definitely one project to watch. However, I've had mixed experiences with its stability, especially since the codebase is evolving very rapidly (featurewise) there are quite some things to watch out for when utilizing third party libaries since not all of them are keeping up with this well enough. Another issue is in distributions, especially enterprise (or LTS) releases tend to stick with older versions of packages only backporting necessary security patches. This could ofcourse change when containerized deployments become more mainstream, however I expect that will take at least a couple of years to really materialize. #2: what are your favorite javascript application libraries and frameworks? At the moment everything seems to be about either Backbone.js, Ember.JS and AngularJS. These platforms are quite different and depending on your needs can either be very much overkill or underfeatured. Backbone in example doesnt have two way data binding out of the box (you can use something like Epoxy.js or stickit), while the others do, however backbone is severely lighter than the other 2 and can utilize quite a broad range of external libraries like underscore js. AngularJS is pretty much universally regarded (always dangerous to state something like that, but please allow me for the sake of argument) to have the broadest featureset, but that also comes with quite a steep learning curve. Projects which start from scratch often seem to select Angular, while Backbone seems to be integrated with existing systems (like, again Drupal) quite often. #3: who's willing to help us draft the perfect protocol for this? I have some experience with messaging protocols ranging from bus networks (yay good old RS485) and SNMP to XMPP, so I'd love to contribute to that, but I don't have a lot of time available, so my contributions would probably mostly be limited to reviewing and the occasional comment. My advise in general however would be (and I know I'm preaching to the choir, but still) to adopt a protocol if it already exists and can be considered an open standard. from that POV the JMAP protocol looks very promising. ==== I hope my input has been useful to you! Looking forward to see what you and the other great community members come up with! Best regards -- OpenNovations / DevHdR Van Sevenbergestraat 49 2274PK Voorburg Tel +31 6 83578847 www.hcderaad.nlHans de Raad -----------------------------------------

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session storage driver plugin support
by Cor Bosman 07 Mar '15

07 Mar '15

Hey all, I recently submitted two PRs to refactor session storage. The first made it possible to hook into sessions, which get initialised very early in the code execution path. The second refactored session storage drivers into separate classes and added redis as a session storage driver. Both PRs were accepted, so for people wanting to experiment you can use redis as a session store in the master branch. I also created a sample plugin that adds php-memcached (not to be confused with php-memcache, they are two different PHP memcache options) as a session store. You can find the example plugin here: https://github.com/corbosman/session_memcached <https://github.com/corbosman/session_memcached> Cor

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PHP profiler
by Cor Bosman 06 Mar '15

06 Mar '15

Hey all, I ran into a new cool php profiler yesterday. https://blackfire.io It's very easy to set up and could help us find bottlenecks in roundcube. Already used it to find some issues in local plugins. Example profiler view for roundcube 1.0: http://shor.ter.net/p9 <http://shor.ter.net/p9> Cor

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Setting the RC local user
by Glen Eustace 06 Mar '15

06 Mar '15

I have been experimenting with allowing any of a users email aliases to be used to login. Using the login hook, I look up the address in our database and return the appropriate user. Dovecot then does the authentication. Unfortunately, I am now getting multiple local users for the same imap mailbox. Is there anyway I can specify that local user so that I don’t get a bunch of split personalities ? Thanks. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Glen Eustace, GodZone Internet Services, a division of AGRE Enterprises Ltd., P.O. Box 8020, Palmerston North, New Zealand 4446 Ph +64 6 357 8168 Fax +64 6 357 8165 Mob +64 27 542 4015 “Specialising in providing low-cost professional Internet since 1997"

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Roundcube nginx configuration
by Raoul Bhatia 01 Mar '15

01 Mar '15

Hi! I have successfully (at least i think ;) ) migrated a roundcube intallation from Apache HTTP server to nginx + php5-fpm. I would now like to share my configuration so that others can use and improve it. I could a) provide the configuration so that we can keep it i sync with the .htaccess file (I would prefer that), b) use the wiki, or c) do something that you suggest instead. Please let me know your preference. Thanks, Raoul -- DI (FH) Raoul Bhatia M.Sc. | E-Mail. raoul(a)bhatia.at Software Development and | Web. http://raoul.bhatia.at/ System Administration | Tel. +43 699 10132530

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