Comments on: Zimbra Desktop http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2008/07/24/zimbra-desktop/ Robert Accettura's Personal Blog on Web Development and Tech Tue, 2 Dec 2008 21:31:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 By: Matthew Gertner http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2008/07/24/zimbra-desktop/#comment-393322 Matthew Gertner Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:14:50 +0000 http://robert.accettura.com/?p=1855#comment-393322 The main reason for the bulkiness of the download is that it includes the entire Java-based Zimbra server. This was done because so much of the application logic resides on the server. I think that moving forward more web app developers will strive to put all application logic in the client (or technology like Jaxer will be used to deploy code that can be executed on the server or client as appropriate) and use the new offline capabilities being deployed by browser vendors (including FF3 of course!) to cache code and store data on the local machine. Hopefully Zimbra will tackle this at some point, but the development effort would be significant considering the size and complexity of the existing code base. The other win would come from using the existing XULRunner runtime on machines which have it installed (including any machine with Firefox). The current ZD download is somewhere in the 30-40Mb range. With these changes, I could imagine it cut to a few 100k at most. Matt The main reason for the bulkiness of the download is that it includes the entire Java-based Zimbra server. This was done because so much of the application logic resides on the server. I think that moving forward more web app developers will strive to put all application logic in the client (or technology like Jaxer will be used to deploy code that can be executed on the server or client as appropriate) and use the new offline capabilities being deployed by browser vendors (including FF3 of course!) to cache code and store data on the local machine. Hopefully Zimbra will tackle this at some point, but the development effort would be significant considering the size and complexity of the existing code base.

The other win would come from using the existing XULRunner runtime on machines which have it installed (including any machine with Firefox). The current ZD download is somewhere in the 30-40Mb range. With these changes, I could imagine it cut to a few 100k at most.

Matt

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