I’m getting involved in an open source Mac project, YMail, and as part of my research I’ve been checking out Lua. From the Lua homepage,
“Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language.”
The project is a Mac interface to Yahoo! Mail, and we need a nice way to deal with the mainly text-based interactions between the desktop and web application. Objective C, unfortunately, is not particularly suited to text-processing, hence the need for a hybrid solution.
It’s still very early days yet, but I’ll post progress updates on this blog.
Glen Scott
I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.
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Have you thought about looking at Adobe AIR?
Or is this going to be an actual Yahoo official application? In which case you wouldn’t want the Adobe name on it.
Hey Peter,
This is going to be an unofficial app, so I’m free to use whatever technology suits. I’ve not checked out AIR at all, so perhaps you could advise on some URL’s that have a good overview of it?
Hey Glen,
Probably the best place would be the official URL…
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
I have been playing around with it since the alpha release. No need to learn new languages, as it uses existing technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Actionscript etc). You can interface with the runtime from Javascript, so for example, you can read / write files to the system.
I would look at the showcase to see what has been done, and by who.
In your case, if you are wanting to interface with Yahoo Mail, then you should be able to make a SMTP Client using the Socket class.
Does Yahoo have an API?
http://labs.adobe.com/showcase/air/
Peter,
Thanks for this, will read up on AIR when I get some time. The thing that initially puts me off is the idea of an “Adobe Runtime”. It conjures up images of a slow-beast of a system, based on my experiences with other Adobe products like Reader and Photoshop.
There is a Yahoo! Mail API (http://developer.yahoo.com/mail/), but because of the Application ID restrictions, it is not suitable for distributed desktop apps. So, our application is going to act like a user-agent and use standard HTTP GET and POST requests to interface with the mail functions.
I have found from the first beta release that the speed is pretty good, though I haven’t really built any big applications, so can’t do any sort of benchmark. Though I have found that when you create custom chrome for the application (i.e complete redesign of the application window), it can be a tad slow when moving / animating the window, though that may have been due to the transparency which was applied.
Keep us posted on how things go with your project 🙂