January notes
Well, it’s been a quiet January here at fettig.net. In the background though, I’ve had quite a productive month working on the Hep message library.
Although I didn’t have much time to work on Hep during the fall, I did do some thinking about areas where the message library needed improvements. Specifically, I wanted to address:
- Sharing data between users, to prevent downloading the same document multiple times
- Caching
- Storing metadata (timestamps, which messages have been read, replied-to, etc.)
- Hierarchical message stores, such as nested mailbox and OPML directories
I think I’ve reached my goals in all those areas. My improved message library
introduces two new objects: a Connector, which manages connections for all users, and a View, which represents a specific user’s view of a message store, including which messages they’ve read, the time they recieved the message, and other metadata. Views have the ability to save their metadata to disk between sessions.
Somewhere along the line I also realized that a multi-user server-based app with an HTML interface isn’t the best place to test library improvements. Every time you want to test something you have to fire up the server, log in, navigate to the right page, check if things are working, repeat. It’s more work, and less fun, than playing around with a single-user desktop application. So I spent some time this month working on a little wxWindows message viewer.
I haven’t written about it here yet because it’s basically only an RSS reader at the moment (although it supports mail as well as RSS/Atom), and I think at this point “I’m working on an RSS reader” has become the programmer blog-post equivalent of “Here’s a cute picture of my cat”. But it’s serving it’s purpose well, as a testbed for new functionality that will eventually find its way into Hep.
