OK, Rephrasing the Questions - Something New

[John Drabik]

On Tue, 19 Sep 2000 02:03:15 -0400 (EDT), Ralph Cohen wrote:

>As Steve mentioned, Polarbar might fit the bill.  I also purchased
>J-Street, Polarbar's predecessor, and if it's still being worked on
>after these two years, then it could provide the kind of high quality
>cross platform email client you described.

Ralph, I'm quite certain that JStreet is no longer being developed. 
Just before they closed it down they offered to give source code to
anybody that wanted it.  In any case, it's dead.  But, read on!

Steve's comment about Polarbar was the next stop on my list.  A quick
stop at Google led to their site.   It appears that it was derived
directly from JStreet.  In particular, note this text from their web
page:

"Download the file polarbar.zip and copy it to your polarbar root
directory. Change your jstreet startup
    script and replace innoval.jar (or pvkxx.zip) with polarbar.zip.
Start The Polarbar Mailer, send an e-mail to the list
    saying how impressed you are with the speed and all the new
features. "

Notice the references to JStreet and Innoval (the creators of
JStreet).  Also, like JStreet, it uses HotJava for HTML rendering,
and they even tell how to extract the HotJava bean from the JStreet
code (and, BTW, they point you to the Yahoo! download site to get
JStreet, so that's where it wound up, although it has not been
updated).

 BTW, you can also get a free copy of Post Road Mailer (also from
Innoval) at the Yahoo! site.  Why you would want to switch from one
unsupported package to another is totally beyond me, however,
especially since the source is not available I think.  Which is too
bad, since PRM had some neat features (like the FTP downloads list;
click a link and either download immediately, or add it to a list for
later downloading.  Great for when you get a message about something
new.  The integrated Zip support was cool too.  And the FAX support
was really cool.)  So even though I don't want PRM, I downloaded it
anyway, to review the features. And, I downloaded Polarbar (Steve,
this doesn't mean I'm giving up on your Python idea, I just want to
check these out).

After thinking about Steve's Python mailer, I think it may be the
best way to go.  Even though Java is well supported on OS/2 right
now, who knows how long that will last, and it is probably easier
(due to Open Source, although Artistic licensed) Python than to write
a JVM.  My concerns about Python are: rapid dev tools; performance
(ditto for Java); and access by other coders.  We'll see how that
goes.

So, I've got a lot of code to review, and some features to review
too.  Just to be safe, I also went and bought Lutz's book on Python,
to bone up (it's been a while since I even looked at it).

Steve, what do you feel the status of your project is with respect to
JStreet/Polarbar, and/or PostRoad?

John