Tomcat Based Webmail

[Jamon Camisso]

Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> Ansar Mohammed wrote:
>>
>> Hello All,
>>
>> I cant help but be impressed by slew of Tomcat applications that are
>> so well written. Is there a central repository of Tomcat applications?
>>
>> Also, is there a tomcat webmail application?
>>
> Tomcat is a servlet web server. This is not a web server per se. If a
> few requests come to Tomcat at the same time, expect with a great chance
> disastrous results. Tomcat should be used together with apache. Apache
> as a front end, sending requests to Tomcat, Tomcat answering and sending
> results back to Apache.
> 
> Better go to PHP for webmail applications. Squirlmail is a good one. It
> works with postfix.

squirrelmail is pretty much the standard for small scale stuff, it's
pretty minimalist though. Roundcube I hear good things about, all ajaxy
and such, same functionality as squirrelmail. Horde is a
framework/portal type setup built around email, calendaring etc.,
groupware type stuff, and pretty widely used.

Each of those is php based. They will easily work with tomcat via
mod_proxy_ajp and "ProxyPass /squirrelmail !" (the ! tells apache not to
pass the path to tomcat but serve it itself). There's no reason you
can't run your webapp with tomcat, and mail apache+php (this is a very
common setup).

Really, it's about choosing the best solution to the problem you are
trying to address. For most it is easier to use one of the php mail
solutions above, but for others, finding or writing their own java
webmail would be better. Depends on what your intent is.

The question then is, what are the particular goals that you have in
mind? Is this a personal learning project or are you setting up a site
for someone. Is it a private site or public etc.? Defining those things
ahead of time will keep you from going down the path of choosing a
language or framework and discovering after months of development that
there is a better alternative. Perhaps one that could have saved you 2
months development time but that wasn't considered because the goals of
the project and needed functionality weren't important factors back in
the beginning pool of possible applications.

Figure out what you need first, then pick something that's approximately
(or perfectly) suited to that. Of course if what you need is to play
around with tomcat, then by all means, go nuts with trying every .war
that you come across.

My $0.02

Jamon
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists