Zimbra

Round 1 covered Firefox 2 vs 3RC1 and the results were much easier to predict and extrapolate, but it wasn’t the same for Internet Explorer 7 vs 8b. In the heavy weight division IE7 is often compared to a 500-pound gorilla, but could Microsoft convince it to go on a diet for IE8?

Once again we used a customized OpenQA Selenium setup to calculate time-taken rendering a page after clicking a particular button/link; across the same set of saved actions such as logging in, composing and viewing messages, navigating around various folders, switching between our many apps, and even changing options as done on Firefox. And IE7 connected a hard blow right off the bat.

 
It’s good that Microsoft finally realized that people were tired of switching between Internet Explorer and a separate development environment such as IEWatch or Visual Studio and polished up their debug tools for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. (We’re gonna cover our favorites from Firebug & Charles to Eclipse, IntelliJ, & GDB later.) They also included more ways to give feedback and track feature requests for this beta period as opposed to last time. IE8b contains sparse CSS3 support, but finally complete HTML4 adherence - though we’re rounding on HTML5, and CSS2.1 compliance isn’t new - it was even aimed for IE7 but ended up sub-par. As far as I can tell most of the JavaScript rendering speed reported by others have been because of DOM enhancements (how you store meaningful amounts of client-side data in a persistent and secure manner) rather than the stated JavaScript the engine overhauls. Either that or it just took so long to warm up for a noticeable kick in our tests.

Granted IE8 is farthest out, so hopefully that gives Microsoft time to refine their closed source browser. Don’t get me wrong IE8b is an improvement; but we’re rounding on GA release of Mozilla Firefox 3 next week, while Apple pushed Safari 3.1.1 into OS X 10.5.3 and already has a game-plan for Safari 4, so Internet Explorer better step up the training regiment.

A few years ago I thought the days of rambling off your entire schedule to someone else, over the phone or via email, to find a meeting time were long dead and gone. What I’ve found after a couple years in the work force is that most of the collaboration platforms today essentially only share free-busy information within your group. More often than not, in broad working units the folks on the other side have a different system. How do you really get anything done when there really is no seamless scheduling interaction between those platforms?

While we’d love the whole world to instantly convert to Zimbra, we realize that from time to time people in this situation for whatever reason (slow migration or stubborn departmental preference) have that one peer organization running different software. How to seamlessly find timeslots for meetings? And what to do for cases where you may not want to share your entire calendar with a huge list of people, a distribution list, or don’t want all your calendar events public?

Well, the CalConnect Roundtable we talked about earlier is finishing up, and as the week drew to a close we had another ace up our sleeve: Free-Busy Interop.

Both the Network and Open Source Editions of Zimbra now support two-way free/busy information with Microsoft’s Exchange Server, IBM’s Lotus Domino Messaging Server, Meeting Maker, and a slew of other third-parties that interact with our API. Plus, the framework is completely available to anyone who wants to build an extension for other platforms!

The query and propagation of free/busy data is done via REST and WebDAV interfaces. You can catch a in-depth walkthrough of how it’s done in this overview PDF.

For info on how to set it up, checkout SRC/ZimbraServer/docs/freebusy-interop.txt. Grab a copy via perforce, this post, or ask us about it in the ZCS forum section.

As we’ve mentioned before it’s about time for another ‘clash of the titans’ in the never ending web browser wars. Raja Rao of our QA team had previously built a sweet AJAX client testing framework, so we decided to pit the major browser’s current releases and nightly builds verses one another. Who will go down in this first round?

Before you go “Wait, is this particular article just Firefox vs Firefox - aren’t newer versions expected to preform better anyways?” think of it as just a warm-up to instill confidence by beating personal records in preparation for some looming, ugly battle-royal. Plus the gym was destroyed last time we had them all in one place, and our graphs just get too cluttered, so you’ll have to come back for other matches like IE7 vs IE8b and Safari 3.1 vs Safari 3 nightly builds.

For Firefox memory bloat tests have been popular lately, but we wanted some real world JavaScript tests through a set of ZWC tasks on 5.0.6 - such as logging in, composing and viewing messages, navigating around various folders, switching between our many apps, and even changing options.

 
FF3RC1 clearly won every test, so Mozilla deserves a pat on the back for advancing their browser. While completing little web-client actions there was often barely a difference. However, where heavy rendering had to be done the improvements were significant - in some places half the rendering time or even three times as fast!

What’s the test harness?   We used a customized OpenQA Selenium setup to calculate time-taken rendering a page after clicking a particular button/link. Test machines were running AMD Opteron 1.8GHz Dual-cores with 2GB RAM against ZCS 5.0.6 GA RHEL4. When we compare other browsers we will be using the same set of saved actions. Try it out yourself and discuss it in the forums - if you’d like some other testing ideas you might play with the other commonly used benchmarks like VeriTest & SunSpider.

 
So what has made Firefox 3 so speedy? Perhaps it’s the Profile-Guided Optimization (dual pass compiling) builds now being created that are greatly improving performance, or lots of combined JavaScript engine enhancements. Have you been comparing all the nightlies leading up to RC1 or noted the exact change that has enhanced it so much? Discuss it below and stay tuned, I hear Safari is pulling out all the stops - get your bets in now.

The coolest thing ever is highlighted in this blog post with a cool video. It took us a little longer than expected to get the extension out, but it’s ready. You need to make sure that you have the com_zimbra_dnd.zip zimlet installed on the server.

This is a Firefox 2.0+ (including Beta 3) extension that allows ZCS 5.0+ users to simply drag attachments into their briefcase and mail compose window.

Special thanks to Suman Raj who spent countless hours getting writing this and keeping Zimbra awesome! The extension can be found over that the Zimbra Gallery.
 
Enjoy!

 

Anyone who’s had an iPhone, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile phone knows that depending on how many accounts you have with different e-mail providers, you can end up with 5 different contact entries for one person. Raja, an Engineer here at Zimbra, wrote this cool Contact Cleaner zimlet which was is in Zimbra 5.0. I asked him to write up a blog post, and make a video. Enjoy!

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2007 was the best year for Zimbra yet. We thought we would take a moment to recap the great things that happened this year. Here are the events that were big milestones for us.

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It’s been tough keeping this one under wraps because it’s so cool. Yep: It’s in Zimbra 5.0.

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Zimlets are great, they allow developers to integrate our mail UI with all kinds of third party web services and APIs. But what about integrating third party management consoles with Zimbra Admin UI? In version 5 Zimbra Admin UI is an open platform that allows developers to integrate ZCS Admin UI with other management consoles and add new features through admin extensions.

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When Zimbra started out we had only a few thousand lines of JavaScript and didn’t really optimize our JavaScript at all. As we added features to the Zimbra Web Client, the code base grew pretty fast. On the client/end user side, raw Javascript in hundreds of script tags were received. This came out to be about 2MB of raw/uncompressed JavaScript, in about 75 files.

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We’re happy to announce the availability of ZCS 4.5.10 for both Network Edition Customers and Open Source Edition users.

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