grendel
by Jeff Galyan and Giao Nguyen
14-Jan-1999

Grendel is the mail-news part of what was commonly known as the "Javagator" project at Netscape. It was released to Mozilla in September, 1998 where it languished in the repository for several months. I am glad to say that the code has recently been adopted and is being brought up to date. In terms of mail clients, it's further along then Mozilla's companion mail-news client right now.

Due to legal restrictions, Grendel's original code was in a very raw state. A lot of its capabilities were taken out. Jamie Zawinski put it back together as much as possible, but elements of a working mail client were missing. Most of the code wasn't compiling. You get the general idea.

grendel today.

Grendel has been cleaned up significantly from its original release state. These are the things that are currently working and fully tested:

• The classic three-pane view of folders, message threads, and message body with message body display. The message display needs work.

• A composition window.

• Reads local Berkely mbox style mail folders.

• Converts mail into formated HTML.

• A working MIME parser.

short term goals

Prior to its release to Mozilla, Grendel was much further along. Much POP, IMAP, and sending capabilities were working. To get it back to it's original glory, Grendel needs these done:

• Update the code to Java 2. Currently, Grendel has namespace collisions with Java 2 due to the introduction of the drag and drop API. Everything is fine with JDK 1.1.7.

• Fix the GUI so we can get all the protocols tested.

• Test all the protocols (POP3, IMAP, NNTP).

Grendel was originally built on pre-releases of JavaMail, ealier releases of JFC and Swing, and JDK 1.1. Since then, JavaMail has been released and is currently at version 1.1, JFC has been updated and Swing is now at version 1.1,and the Java platform has reached version 2.0.

long term goals.

To get Grendel stellar again, it needs a lot of work to be something more than just a mail client. Some ideas includes:

• A better message display integrated into the message view. We're using Swing's packaged renderer and it's failing on the more complex tables.

• Advanced Mail filtering. It would be nice to write complex rulesets in something like JavaScript or Java.

• Tools like Intertwingle could be written on top of Grendel.

dependencies.

• JavaBeans Activation Framework version 1.0;

• Sun's JavaMail version 1.1;

• Java Foundation Classes version 1.1 (with Swing 1.1);

• Sun's Java Project X, an XML enabling service (Early Access 2);

• Netscape's Directory SDK version 3.05.

documentation.

• A high-level description of the Grendel architecture, and how its components fit together.

• Some thoughts on message filtering.

• Native methods that Grendel will require in order to function properly (required services that can't be implemented in pure Java code.)

• Database requirements for mail/news message stores.