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the 69 caddy. they don't make 'em like they used to.

what daddy does at work.

Over at Laszlo, we just launched Laszlo Mail, a free version of our rich webmail client. Even if you don't need another email account, give it a whirl and let me know what you think. Of course, this is a 1.0 release so we're still adding lots of features. (most "web 2.0" companies would call this a beta for 15 months.)

A few things of interest:

• The client app is written entirely, of course, using OpenLaszlo. The middle tier is Java, MySQL, and your IMAP server of choice. (I think this install uses Cyrus.)
• The client itself is a 425k download. Without the fancy landing screen, it's 345k.
• The small bit of DHTML stuff -- scrollbars and an iframe to display HTML messages -- is about 100k of javascript.
• It is a webmail client, which means no storing stuff on your machine (like, say, message headers). Everything happens over the wire, every session, and the app still feels snappy.
• Lines of code:
  • lzx: 12,000 lines
  • js: 3,100 lines
  • java: 10,000 lines
  That's insane. Every time I read those numbers, I double-check my SLOC script to be sure it's working right.

It's also surprising to me how quickly one forgets it's a webmail app. Everyone compares it to Outlook or Thunderbird, not Hotmail/Gmail/etc. "Can I do virtual filtered folders? Can I work offline?"

Anyway, that's what I've been working on for the last year or so. Most fun I've ever had at work.