Re: SqMail API (and other APIs)

[Luke E. <leh...@cs...>]

> Yes, I know this is a very strange idea to be holding function names 
> in an array. Just an idea.

:)  A good idea, and probably would work, but I think it's really a
round-about way of doing this just to avoid objects.  OOP in PHP isn't that
bad.  The only problem is that it isn't _GOOD_ in the sense that Java has
good OOP capabilities.  OOP in PHP works sufficiently for what we will need
it though, and I think it will be nice clean interface (if we design it
properly).

This past weekend was pretty boring for me.  I was at home with only my
parent's Win98 box (YUCK) and a 56k connection that connected at 28.8
usually.  Anyway, as such, I developed what I believe to be a good API for
the mail interface (I named it sqmail).  Attached is the documentation for
it.  I have also been implementing it using PHP, and it works suprisingly
well.  Below is some example code of how it would be implemented.

--start--
<?php
   $sqmail = new Sqlib_Mail ($username, $password, $server, $port);
   $sqmail->select("INBOX");
   
   echo "Number of messages: " . $sqmail->num_messages() . "<br>";
   $messages = $sqmail->fetch_brief_headers();
   for ($i=0; $i < count($messages); $i++) {
      echo $messages[$i]->from . ", ";
      echo $messages[$i]->subject . ", ";
      echo $messages[$i]->date . "<br>"
   }
   $sqmail->close()
?>
--end--

And what that would look like (displayed) would be a simple list of all the
messages in your INBOX.

Take a look at the API documentation.  A lot of the ideas have been taken
directly from the PHP IMAP documenation to make it easier to implement PHP's
IMAP libraries as a separate implemenation.  This design is much cleaner
than what we currently have... MUCH cleaner.  :)

Luke

    _
   . .   Luke Ehresman - "Codito, ergo sum"
 /  v  \  leh...@cs...
/(     )\  http://www.css.tayloru.edu/~lehresma
  ^^ ^^