Rant mode on.
If Perl is so great for programming web applications. Where
are the high profile Open Source Webmail projects using Perl?
I just spent a good couple of hours looking and found a few written
in Perl but almost all of them fall under the following categories:
- Payware (ex. @Mail )
- Haven’t been maintained in over a year and looked more like someone’s pet project (ex. NeoMail )
- Unclear how it handles multilingual email (NeoMail)
- Doesn’t integrate well with mod_perl (OpenMail)
- Handles POP3 and that’s it or some variant. ( Perl WebMail )
What is up with this? If you do a search on webmail client and
Open Source you’ll find at least 3 or 4 GOOD webmail clients written in
PHP. Most of what I see for Perl is a bunch of libraries and then
there’s Bricolage which is huge and completely non useful as a webmail
client. When it comes to a webmail client I see that some of the
better PHP systems (SquirrelMail, Horde, IlohaMail) have the following qualities:
- Handling of IMAP and POP3
- Handles Maildir and mbox
- HAVE dealt with the multi-lingual issue
- The interfaces look more polished than ‘I just hacked it together maybe it works’
- Are being actively maintained
- Are free
When it comes to webmail with Perl it seems like There’s No Good
Way To
Do It. If Perl is the a major deity when it comes to string
processing and working with the web where the hell are the
competing implementations for one of the more popular apps on the
Internet? After looking at the Perl offerings the closest
that comes to what I want is Perl WebMail. But it might just be
easier to turn on PHP and install a more actively maintained system.
