Am 17.03.2015 um 22:10 schrieb Brendan:
the mail interactions could be offloaded to a completely different project. Dovecot has announced gmail-api support, and has also floated the idea of supporting JMAP. If the rouncube client can just call a standard JSON API to get mail from the imap server, then roundcube doesn't need to worry about that portion at all (which would be a very good thing - indexing/caching/etc would all be handled by the imap server)
but then you have to support different servers which means a ton of combinations to test and debug - IMAP is a standard protocol
even if dovecot/courier/etc don't directly support any JSON APIs, a separate daemon could be produced to do the proxying/conversion. it need not be part of the roundcube project (there's already an IMAP->JMAP gateway/proxy https://github.com/jmapio/jmap-perl/blob/master/bin/server.pl). for hosting situations where only php is allowed, a non-daemonized version proxy layer could be written in php.
again: you would have a dozen of different roundcubes
the more the backend components are separated, the easier is it for everyone to find optimal ways to run it in their environment
flexible != easy
what most people expect is "unpack a tarball in a webhost, enter username and password, done" - you can say that you don't care for that expectation and that these users are no longer you target, that may be fine from your sie but at the sam emoment would mean lose a large part of the userbase
if roundcube goes that way: bye