Expect a few more postings from me over the next few weeks as I evaluate and compare Servoy to FileMaker. I am getting a little tired of the “work arounds” that FileMaker offers (when u want to go beyond the basics).
I have been looking at intergrating a pop3 mail client plugin into our existing FMP solution. It requires dozens of fields and pages of scripts to send a message (and the plugin cost us several hundred dollars). Surely it doesn’t need to be that complicated! Complexity for the sake of performance - that’s OK, but complexity to enable basic functionality seems like a waist of time.
I have experimented with Servoy and I like what I see.
How easy is it to integrate an email client into a Servoy solution?
Also has anyone had success deploying to a PDA (windows mobile 5.0)?
One of our customer systems uses the built-in E-mail client. Averages about 300 emails a day and Attachments table now about 1.5Gb. Works fine straight out the box - with a bit of coding of course.
However, you should also checkout the superb MAilPro 2 Email plugin recently released by Patrick Ruhsert of Dr. Maison & Partner GmbH which also has IMAP support. See this post: http://forum.servoy.com/viewtopic.php?p=36634
Haven’t worked with PDA’s yet but others have successfully. This is Servoy - it just works
This is a sample of a solution that was done using the Servoy headless client. It could be done much easier now with the new Servoy webclient which writes the jsp pages for you.
I think I put this link up more than a year ago and have never had to touch it. The sample is for a vertical market (the insurance industry), but I think it is enough to give you an idea of what can be done. Please click the “Log Out” button when finished looking at it. That will kill the session and make it available to others. It may be setup for only three licenses. I do not remember.
Whilst the cost comparisons bear out the fact that Servoy plugins come incuded with the license and FM requires extra outlay, I am interested in your quote below:
russb1970:
I have been looking at intergrating a pop3 mail client plugin into our existing FMP solution. It requires dozens of fields and pages of scripts to send a message (and the plugin cost us several hundred dollars). Surely it doesn’t need to be that complicated! Complexity for the sake of performance - that’s OK, but complexity to enable basic functionality seems like a waist of time.
I have used mail plugins with FileMaker for some time and have found that they need only the fields that you already have in your database structure from which to draw the recipient data and a single script to send the mail.
If you are doing more complex actions on the data like looping through foundsets, adding attachments, altering them into HTML then, indeed, this will be a more involved process relative to what actions you need to perform.
I mention this not to start a debate but only because it is diametrically opposite to my experiences and it may be that we are using different plugins - POP3it [manage inbound mail] & SMTPit [manage outbound mail] by CNS - no connection BTW
Still, I would appreciate hearing more of what was so complex in FM - off list I would think is best
Westy, great demo. I love this sort of stuff - pure & simple with high functionality. When you hit the login page, are you “within” the Servoy session, or do you only activate Servoy once you authenticate?
Regarding email, I’ve created many email solutions for Filemaker databases, none of them using plugins. I don’t like the way any of the email plugins work. Instead, I’ve written shell scripts and applescripts to handle incoming and outgoing email, including attachments, between Filemaker and OS X’s built-in Postfix email server. If you’re using FMSA (with the web publishing engine), you can use a PHP script to transfer email to/from Postfix to Filemaker server. Of course, it sounds like Servoy does this right out of the box, which leads to my question:
Does Servoy’s email capabilities allow the server to automatically upload and download email to a table? Or is it just providing a Servoy interface for users to send email to/from their desktop? What I’m looking for is the ability for all incoming and outgoing email to “live” in Servoy, in an SQL table, and for all transfers to be handled by a central server. Our users should never have to make POP/SMTP connections from their local machines when transfering database-related email. It should all be done thru the server or a headless client.
The Servoy email client allows you to either ‘hardcode’ the POP/SMTP values through the Edit Prefs panel, or setup tables with values linked to individual Users.
We use the second option and Users can Get/Send Mail whenever required. Although the Get/Send actions are triggered by individual Users, the POP/SMTP connections and all data storage is handled by the Server.
Incoming emails are stored in a Documents table on the Server after being linked to the Contacts table via the Email_From field, and linked to the User via the Email_To field. Outgoing Emails are stored in same table and again linked to Users and Contacts.
If required you could setup a Cron job to automatically get/send Emails at set intervals.
Or use the MailPro-Plugin that can automatically be notified by the mail server when a new message arrives and call a method in your solution that saves it to the database…
Or use DBMail and have it stored in a database when the email arrives, including attachments. No need for POP/IMAP coding in Servoy, you simply use SQL.
DBMail works with any of the major SMTP servers.
And DBMail comes with a POP3 and IMAP service so you can still use regular email clients as well.
DBMail is released under the GPL and maintained by 2 dutch linux consultancy businesses.
ROCLASI:
Or use DBMail and have it stored in a database when the email arrives, including attachments. No need for POP/IMAP coding in Servoy, you simply use SQL.
DBMail works with any of the major SMTP servers.
It seems a very interesting product: did you use that in conjunction with Servoy?
Riccardino:
It seems a very interesting product: did you use that in conjunction with Servoy?
Not yet. I stumbled upon it a couple of weeks ago.
I am trying to get it compiled on Mac OS X but that seems not that easy.
But like you say it seems a very interesting product and it has a pretty active mailinglist.
What I’m hearing from grahamg’s post is that user/client events can trigger a process on Servoy server, like get/send mail. This is a huge departure from what we’re used to with Filemaker server, which cannot do anything in response to client events. FM server can only serve FM files - it has no accessible API. It’s very secure in this way, but it limits what we can do with server-based processes in response to client events.
Regarding email, it occured to me that I could simply (ha!) have the mail server inject mail directly into the SQL table, completely bypassing Servoy. Sounds like DBMail is a go-between for this sort of setup.
I’d like to avoid having to rely on cron scripts to poll for incoming or outgoing mail. Incoming is easier, as you can have the mail server “push” email into the database. Outgoing is trickier - the transfer from database to SMTP server needs to happen in response to a change in the data (a “queued” flag). I s’pose at some level, periodic polling is required, whether it’s cron, DBMail, or some other process. Most of my experience here is with Filemaker, so I look forward to discovering how Servoy handles all this.
I have a solution running as a batch processor with the MailPro plugin. It “listens” to several folders on an Imap server. When the server receives a new message, it notifies the headless client and delivers the message. The message itself is fully received inside the plugin in a background process. All the headless does is save it to the DB, create an automatic answer message and send that out. The whole process involves three methods with no more than 30 lines of code. Of course, you can program all kinds of things (even something like Servoy), but you can also simply use what somebody else already spent a lot of time on. Just my thoughts…
Forgot to mention a nice detail: after the message is sent, it is automatically copied to a sent folder on another account. So when I sit here I can see the mails that have been sent out from the headless in the office in my sent folder in Thunderbird.