Erlang Software Framework

I’ve been getting a few emails about ErlMail in the past few weeks. Two people have reported bugs, one in the IMAP client and the other in the SMTP server. As soon as I am finished getting the bugs out of my Flash Media Server I’m going to concentrate on ERlMail for a while.

First I’m planning on a quick bug fix release to take care of the two known bugs, then I’m going to start on a few major parts of the ErlMail server. Here is a quick list of what I am planning on doing for the next version:

• Rework TCP communication in all modules
• Implement a modular and replaceable email store
• Create a MIME engine for encoding and decoding of MIME messages
• Create the IMAP server

The Email Store I am planning on creating will be a behavior that can be changed out so that you can use any type of message store you want. I intend on writing a generic version of a MailDir store and a MySQL store in the first version of the store.

Next the MIME engine is pretty self explanatory and it is needed for the bigger project that I really want to get to, the IMAP server.

The IMAP server will most likely be the most complicated piece of ErlMail for a while. The protocol itself is pretty large and so I will be implementing the most commonly used features at first and adding the rest as time permits. If I did my work on the IMAP client well enough I already have some of the code written for decoding the IMAP commands, I’ve got my fingers crossed on that one.

My intention is to have a fully functional, possibly not 100% RFC compliant, but working email server by the end of October. With the addition of the message store, the SMTP server will be able to store the messages, the MIME engine and IMAP server will allow client to retrieve the email from the server.

If the project goes well and time permits I will also be looking into adding a POP3 client and server and I’m going to be leaving hooks in my code to start implimenting some anti-spam features.

I already have one company that I am in talks with to sponsor my work on this and I am looking for anyone else who would like to as well. So if you are interested in seeing an open source OTP compliant email server drop me a line or use the donate link to help me pay my bills for next month. The more time I can spend on this the better and faster it will get done

Technorati Tags: ErlMail, IMAP, SMTP, Erlang

Quick update on this, I ended up writing a quick wrapper to perform the conversation I needed using FFMpeg. IT was quick and dirty to build a command line from some options and then make an OS call to run FFMpeg.

It’s working pretty well, although I think it would be nice to have a port that can take full advantage of the FFMpeg API.

I’ve been working on some projects in Erlang that I’m not sure if I want to keep them closed source or put them out in Open source. I’ve been going back and forth on this for several weeks and I thought I’d ask some opinions.

The two projects that I have that are big and somewhat harder then I would normally attempt are a Flash Media Server and a very specific VoIP server, both written in Erlang of course.

I haven’t started on the VoIP server yet, but I will as soon as I stabilize the Flash Media Server that I have been working on nearly non-stop for the past few weeks. The biggest problems I having at the moment is completely understand the TCP dumps I’m working with. I have the server communications working, the RTMP encode and decode is working pretty well and the AMF encoding and decoding is nearly perfect, I think I still need to add a few more AMF types. I can read and write FLV files but when it comes down to the playing or recording of FLV over the stream my packets seems to get to be the wrong size very quickly.

In any case, if anyone else is actively working on a Flash Media Server in Erlang and would like to talk about it please email me. I could be persuaded to turn mine into a new open source project that we could all benefit from.

As for the VoIP server, I’m leaning a little more towards opening that one up from start as all of the protocols are already open and having more people looking at the code will only help that project.

Technorati Tags: Erlang, Flash Media Server, FSM, VoIP