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Project “WebMail” is an email management web base application developed by Gizmox. It allows the user to manage multiple email accounts from different vendors in one place while fulfilling all the standard email applications client abilities.

Project “WebMail” started from Gizmox need to display Visual WebGui’s (VWG) abilities to create a real world web application. This application is the benchmark for developing a VWG application. It was designed to expose the full power and the best practices of building a VWG application. The idea was to demonstrate to VWG users what abilities you get when developing a full VWG application and to compare it to other equivalent existing application abilities.

Gizmox is the company behind Visual WebGui open source platform and products and the company that leads supports and backs up VWG. 
VWG is an open source “Web like desktop” application platform. It incorporates RAD development framework that integrates seamlessly into Visual Studio. VWG enables web applications development using desktop like ultra productive( WinForms like) drag & drop  designer. Application built with VWG can be accessed through multiple presentation layers (currently available DHTML, Silverlight and a smart client).

The VWG development team took a real world desktop application such as Microsoft Outlook that has a corresponding web application, Outlook Web Access, and ported it to a VWG web application. Outlook Web Access grants the user with the ability to access his account through the web as if he was using his Outlook WinForm application. The difference between Outlook Web Access and Outlook is in the appearance, Outlook Web Access has a different look because it limited by the limitations of developing a regular web application. VWG paradigm bypass those limitations. To validate VWG edge VWG core development team developed the email management abilities of Outlook in a web application  while keeping the same look and behavior of the desktop application.

This project gave us the opportunity to demonstrate creation of a fully blown, data-centric, enterprise-level Microsoft Silverlight applications using VWG. It exposes some of the 60 controls that are available to the developer/designer when using VWG over Silverlight.

Project “WebMail” is a show case to VWG ability to deploy the same application in a few presentation layers. It’s the first application that will be distributed as a DHTML application and as a Silverlight application. It shows how developing a Visual WebGui application can be distributed using Silverlight abilities to displays the same DHTML application in a rich, visually stunning and interactive experiences that Silverlight application have.

Project “WebMail” is a live product that will attract many users this will allow us to to stretch test and validate VWG  Scalability.

VWG uses Ajax uniquely optimized protocol (over standard HTTP / XML). Kernel is downloaded once after which only state and data changes are going back and forth as required communicated through differential mechanism, with meta data only going back and forth. This result are payloads that never exceed 1KB and highly responsive application which utilizes fewer resources enabling servers to handle more concurrent users. An average round trip is less than 1K of Meta data unaffected by application weight and size. This allows a VWG application to handle growing amounts of load without sacrificing performance.

this project got allocation of one VWG core developer, for one month. 25% of his time was spent on research and the “Business logic” of the system. We included in the project third party components like SubSonic that required a learning curve as well. 75% of his time was dedicated to creating the rich UI that you can see. New custom controls where created as well such as “RibbonBar” that resembles to Outlook ReboonBar down to the last pixel.

The Future

The future of the project is to continue to be the “Display window” for Visual WebGui benefits and features. We plan to implement in this project our newest features and to use the most usable programming methodologies to allow our users to learn and to develop by capitalizing on VWG core team “know how” and experience. 
We also plan to continue enriching this product to support many other features that Outlook supports such as contacts management, notes, tasks and calendar and to add on the original Outlook features in terms of collaboration and mash up from different resources.

You can see project “WebMail” as Silverlight here.

Or you can see project “WebMail” as DHTML here.

Stay tuned.

-- Eyal Albert @ Eyal.Albert (at) Gizmox.com