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Clean, fast, simple, functional, PHP-based, does all that mail/todo/calendar/scheduling stuff through your web browser: twig rocks

There are a lot of web based mail/office systems in OSS that could be a good replacement. One of the first ones I used was twig, with a not so flashy interface, but very good functionality, but there are a lot of alternatives. Or go to some kind of groupware, like phpgroupware mentioned earlier or PHProjekt, that is also very good. Also not only groupwares have a webmail interfaces, other kind of projects have it, like TikiWiki, that can have another central functionality, but as it have integrated webmail it could be good as a replacement integrated with more solutions.

TWIG does all that, in a nice spiffy web interface. It's GPLd.

TWIG does all that, in a spiffy web interface. It's GPLd.

I agree with all you say here, but why do you have to have wireless? It's a whole lot easier to plug into a phone jack, dial up, and do your thing. If you're lucky, your ISP provides a web-based interface like TWIG. If not, you can always SSH in (you *do* get a shell account from your ISP, right?)

I'm not sure that I agree than Carbon will make your app easier to port. There is an open-source, cross-platform reimplementation of most of Cocoa called GNUStep, which is based on the old OpenStep spec (just like Cocoa). Using GNUStep you can run the same (or very similar) code on, say, Linux and OS X. See GNUMail.app for an example. Here is a screenshot of it running under Mac OS X, and here is a pic of the same program running on Linux via GNUStep.

I'm not sure that I agree than Carbon will make your app easier to port. There is an open-source, cross-platform reimplementation of most of Cocoa called GNUStep, which is based on the old OpenStep spec (just like Cocoa). Using GNUStep you can run the same (or very similar) code on, say, Linux and OS X. See GNUMail.app for an example. Here is a screenshot of it running under Mac OS X, and here is a pic of the same program running on Linux via GNUStep.

Ok, I'm biased because I know a lot of people who work/used to work on the project. But TWIG has always been a great mailreader, if you're into the web-based mail reader sort of thing. It's a PHP-based client that, in addition to mail, it has newsgroup capability, a scheduler, and a bunch of other keen things.

TWIG links:
twig.screwdriver.net
TWIG on Freshmeat.

Also, be sure to query 'twig' on sourceforge to see a few other projects that involve TWIG.

I do think both are very cool, but when I'm away from my personal computer, I find stuff like phpGroupWare and TWIG to be most helpful. Basically, both are still in the useable but not yet completely polished phases of development. When phpGroupWare is done, I have fairly high hopes for it.

In addition to allowing me to keep working when I don't have my own laptop with me or it's out for repair, I find the whole idea of Web Gateways much better for real "remote" work.

XTerminals are best (IMHO) if your looking for a single server, multiple user points on a fast network. But on a slower network, or more remote, I think web gateways would be better.

I guess I'm missing why VNC is the ultimate solution here....

If you need to be able to grow to form a huge community, then you'll need slashcode.

But if you are talking about a few thousand visitors per day, you should look into any of the following slash-alikes:

• PHPslash
• Squishdot
• ThatPHPware
• scoop
• SlashJ
• sips
• localecho
• twig
• ASPslash
• phpweblog

Methinks this would have been a better question to ask on Slashcode.org instead of here on Slashdot itself.

Why not check out http://www.cru.fr/http-mail/. It is the "HTTP Mail User Agent inventory". It's a little old, but it still lists a lot of programs.

twig looks best to me.

It has Mail, Contacts (with a realistic amount of info that can be supplied), schedule, todo, notes and bookmarks. It uses only plain HTML so it can be used on any browser, no java or javascript needed.

It seems to work with just about any IMAP backend (I'm still using a NT based IMAP package on a different machine that was left from the previous admin.)

As an aside... As long as the packages your interested in aren't tied to different backends, there isn't any reason to not install several and play with them all until you find The One True(tm) mail package for you.

Just My View

Amazingly enough, I work for a company that has received an overseas contract. =) Let me give you some views from the "other side".

First of all, as someone mentioned above, specifications are a MUST! And detailed specs are a MUST. We're lucky in that we get alot of le-way in terms of the technical decisions, however, in the industry that we work for, there are countless details that do not pertain to computing (or design in general) that we must follow. What helps for these details is having someone (the project manager) come overseas and work with us for a week or so every couple of months.

Another thing that helps immensly(sp?) are web-based scheduling and bug tracking tools. We just started to use TWIG, a resource management tool. It's fast, easy to use, and free! :)

Other than that, remeber that just as with any project, a good, solid design and specification at the start will ease the entire development process right up to release. Good luck!

Chris

I hate this attitude that people have of always wanting to put down that other database. It doesn't have to be that way. Both Postgres and MySQL are storming databases. They are both OpenSource and they are both developing (in there own way) at a nice speed.

I think that when we develop OpenSource database applications we should, wherever possible, seperate out the database layer to allow users to decide which database backends to use. This is what makes applications like TWIG so great.

We should be happy that we have two good Open Source database systems. We should push the development of both and give support to both. Of course they both have advantages and disadvantages so individuals should evaluate these based on their own requirements.

And in fact I am currently migrating one of my web sites (in PHP3) from PostgreSQL to MySQL because MySQL is significantly faster and stable compared to PostgreSQL.

I used to be a fan of PostgreSQL, and always thought it was a more superior product than MySQL because of more completed SQL support. The web site I have been building has been running on PostgreSQL for more than a year now (from 6.4 to now at 6.5.3). As the amount of data grows larger, there are constantly problems with the backend DBM. The postmaster sigfaults every now and then, and for a couple of times I have to restore to backup because it refuses to function anymore. Most annoyingly, PostgreSQL still has the row size limit of 8k, which is just ridiculous for developing any application.

I have been running TWIG on the same host, and initially I used PostgreSQL as its backend. That was a big mistake because it takes around 5 seconds just to perform all the queries in a page! I then tried MySQL, and that makes a huge difference.

I do understand that MySQL does not support many nice features that I like from PostgreSQL, especially the subqueries and foreign keys. However, it is still a better DB for web based application.

There is a systems out, that does groupware type of functions through a browser.
It already exists, is open source, and is useable if not complete yet.
It can be found here.
It is called TWIG, or "The Web Information Gateway".
It might be a solution, and if more people got involved in it it might go faster, and get developed a bit more quickly.
There is also Zope.
It is a python programming language, and there are , I am sure, ways of duplicating Exchange to Outlook interaction using that.
Just my $.02

For and IMAP server I use the Courier IMAP package. It is a small, featurefull server which support Maildir. It would probably be fine for your needs as it has a very well designed authentication model which supports LDAP (among other things). Courier is faster and smaller than UW-IMAP and Cyrus.

Finally I use TWIG for Webmail. It supports IMAP mail, calendars, contact lists, newsgroups, etc. It is also based on PHP (yay!).

It is a very nice setup, and wasen't too hard to setup. Oh, I forgot to mention that the server is FreeBSD 3.4.

Twig

and


Horde/Imp

These guys are great for webmail, calendering and contact management.
A good forum type app would be Sporum. They are all freely distributable and only require IMAP (not a problem on an Intranet),mysql and perl. Twig uses php as well. All of these are fairly easy to set up (especially with php as a DSO in apache). I've set up all 3 on our intranet as evaluating a few options. They are all easily customizable. Any combination of these with a couple of hacks and snips here and there and you have your own web based groupware. =)
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece

Use IMAP. The best support for IMAP is provided by Outlook Express on Windows (Not outlook; it cannot store sent messages on the server), and, of course, twig, and IMP.

I tried netscape on Unix, but it crashes when I use it with IMAP. Also, IMAP is way better than POP, even when POP supports leaving the mail on the server.

I heard that vm on emacs support IMAP, and so does mutt. I haven't tried them though.

I think, from what I've read, the best buy for general use today are those cards based on the Trident 4D Wave NX chipset.

They're relatively inexpensive, have fancy features like digital output, are well supported under Linux, and are produced by a company which has not only released full technical documentation for these cards (without any silly NDA's), but fully GPL'd Linux drivers have been written and released by Trident themselves. You can't ask for much more than that.

Check out those made by Hoontech for example.

See John Fulmer's lengthy review.