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849b4ec9e9
it was far down on the roadmap, but implemented earlier, because it's interesting, and to help prepare for a jmap implementation. for jmap we need to implement more client-like functionality than with just imap. internal data structures need to change. jmap has lots of other requirements, so it's already a big project. by implementing a webmail now, some of the required data structure changes become clear and can be made now, so the later jmap implementation can do things similarly to the webmail code. the webmail frontend and webmail are written together, making their interface/api much smaller and simpler than jmap. one of the internal changes is that we now keep track of per-mailbox total/unread/unseen/deleted message counts and mailbox sizes. keeping this data consistent after any change to the stored messages (through the code base) is tricky, so mox now has a consistency check that verifies the counts are correct, which runs only during tests, each time an internal account reference is closed. we have a few more internal "changes" that are propagated for the webmail frontend (that imap doesn't have a way to propagate on a connection), like changes to the special-use flags on mailboxes, and used keywords in a mailbox. more changes that will be required have revealed themselves while implementing the webmail, and will be implemented next. the webmail user interface is modeled after the mail clients i use or have used: thunderbird, macos mail, mutt; and webmails i normally only use for testing: gmail, proton, yahoo, outlook. a somewhat technical user is assumed, but still the goal is to make this webmail client easy to use for everyone. the user interface looks like most other mail clients: a list of mailboxes, a search bar, a message list view, and message details. there is a top/bottom and a left/right layout for the list/message view, default is automatic based on screen size. the panes can be resized by the user. buttons for actions are just text, not icons. clicking a button briefly shows the shortcut for the action in the bottom right, helping with learning to operate quickly. any text that is underdotted has a title attribute that causes more information to be displayed, e.g. what a button does or a field is about. to highlight potential phishing attempts, any text (anywhere in the webclient) that switches unicode "blocks" (a rough approximation to (language) scripts) within a word is underlined orange. multiple messages can be selected with familiar ui interaction: clicking while holding control and/or shift keys. keyboard navigation works with arrows/page up/down and home/end keys, and also with a few basic vi-like keys for list/message navigation. we prefer showing the text instead of html (with inlined images only) version of a message. html messages are shown in an iframe served from an endpoint with CSP headers to prevent dangerous resources (scripts, external images) from being loaded. the html is also sanitized, with javascript removed. a user can choose to load external resources (e.g. images for tracking purposes). the frontend is just (strict) typescript, no external frameworks. all incoming/outgoing data is typechecked, both the api request parameters and response types, and the data coming in over SSE. the types and checking code are generated with sherpats, which uses the api definitions generated by sherpadoc based on the Go code. so types from the backend are automatically propagated to the frontend. since there is no framework to automatically propagate properties and rerender components, changes coming in over the SSE connection are propagated explicitly with regular function calls. the ui is separated into "views", each with a "root" dom element that is added to the visible document. these views have additional functions for getting changes propagated, often resulting in the view updating its (internal) ui state (dom). we keep the frontend compilation simple, it's just a few typescript files that get compiled (combined and types stripped) into a single js file, no additional runtime code needed or complicated build processes used. the webmail is served is served from a compressed, cachable html file that includes style and the javascript, currently just over 225kb uncompressed, under 60kb compressed (not minified, including comments). we include the generated js files in the repository, to keep Go's easily buildable self-contained binaries. authentication is basic http, as with the account and admin pages. most data comes in over one long-term SSE connection to the backend. api requests signal which mailbox/search/messages are requested over the SSE connection. fetching individual messages, and making changes, are done through api calls. the operations are similar to imap, so some code has been moved from package imapserver to package store. the future jmap implementation will benefit from these changes too. more functionality will probably be moved to the store package in the future. the quickstart enables webmail on the internal listener by default (for new installs). users can enable it on the public listener if they want to. mox localserve enables it too. to enable webmail on existing installs, add settings like the following to the listeners in mox.conf, similar to AccountHTTP(S): WebmailHTTP: Enabled: true WebmailHTTPS: Enabled: true special thanks to liesbeth, gerben, andrii for early user feedback. there is plenty still to do, see the list at the top of webmail/webmail.ts. feedback welcome as always. |
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| .. | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| default.go | ||
| doc.go | ||
| equal.go | ||
| exec.go | ||
| export.go | ||
| format.md | ||
| gendoc.sh | ||
| keys.go | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| Makefile | ||
| nonzero.go | ||
| pack.go | ||
| parse.go | ||
| plan.go | ||
| query.go | ||
| README.md | ||
| register.go | ||
| stats.go | ||
| store.go | ||
| tags.go | ||
| tx.go | ||
Bstore is a database library for storing and quering Go values.
Bstore is designed as a small, pure Go library that still provides most of the common data consistency requirements for modest database use cases. Bstore aims to make basic use of cgo-based libraries, such as sqlite, unnecessary.
See https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/mjl-/bstore for features, examples and full documentation.
MIT-licensed
FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Is bstore an ORM?
No. The API for bstore may look like an ORM. But instead of mapping bstore "queries" (function calls) to an SQL query string, bstore executes them directly without converting to a query language, storing the data itself.
How does bstore store its data?
A bstore database is a single-file BoltDB database. BoltDB provides ACID properties. Bstore uses a BoltDB "bucket" (key/value store) for each Go type stored, with multiple subbuckets: one for type definitions, one for the actual data, and one bucket per index. BoltDB stores data in a B+tree. See format.md for details.
How does bstore compare to sqlite?
Sqlite is a great library, but Go applications that require cgo are hard to cross-compile. With bstore, cross-compiling to most Go-supported platforms stays trivial (though not plan9, unfortunately). Although bstore is much more limited in so many aspects than sqlite, bstore also offers some advantages as well. Some points of comparison:
- Cross-compilation and reproducibility: Trivial with bstore due to pure Go, much harder with sqlite because of cgo.
- Code complexity: low with bstore (7k lines including comments/docs), high with sqlite.
- Query language: mostly-type-checked function calls in bstore, free-form query strings only checked at runtime with sqlite.
- Functionality: very limited with bstore, much more full-featured with sqlite.
- Schema management: mostly automatic based on Go type definitions in bstore, manual with ALTER statements in sqlite.
- Types and packing/parsing: automatic/transparent in bstore based on Go types (including maps, slices, structs and custom MarshalBinary encoding), versus manual scanning and parameter passing with sqlite with limited set of SQL types.
- Performance: low to good performance with bstore, high performance with sqlite.
- Database files: single file with bstore, several files with sqlite (due to WAL or journal files).
- Test coverage: decent coverage but limited real-world for bstore, versus extremely thoroughly tested and with enormous real-world use.