The requirement for services to be idempotent is often stated as being important for enterprise applications. But what does that mean, and why? Idempotent means that a service can be called multiple times with the same data, and the result will always be the same. For example, if a service call results in a value being written to a database, the same service call made again would result in the same value being written to the database. As such, additative processes where values are incremented cannot be idempotent, for example an insert statement in a database is not idempotent, whereas an update statement usually is. Imagine the case of purchasing a ticket from a web service offering airline tickets. The process probably includes getting an offer to see the price and tarif, reserving an instance of that ticket and finally when the shopping cart is full, confirming that ticket by booking it. Getting an offer would be an idempotent call, since we are just effectively reading data, not writing it. Reserving the ticket cannot be idempotent because each call should result in an individual seat being temporarily reserved - you don't want to reserve the same seat for two passengers. However, should such a reserved ticket not be booked, a background process would need to cancel the temporary reservation, so idempotency is effectively achieved. In the final call, to book a reservation (to guarantee the seat), the call should be idempotent - setting the status of the ticket to "booked"…
Day: 29 September 2009
Building a Webmail Solution on top of Apache James Mail Server
Part of maxant's offering to small businesses is email hosting. As well as standard POP3/SMTP access, maxant offers webmail access. A quick search on the web shows that there are several open source webmail solutions available. The problem with all of them is that they communicate with the email server through the SMTP protocol. For example, if you wish to preview a list of emails, the web application needs to access the email server and ask for details of each email (while leaving them on the email server, so they can be downloaded at a later time via POP3). Reading all the emails is inefficient and the larger the number of emails in your inbox, the longer it takes to just see a list of emails. The solution built by maxant is based on the Java Mail API from Sun. This API lets you access individual emails in your inbox using an ID. But Apache James Mail Server (James for short) doesn't maintain the index, if a new mail is put in the inbox, so if you have a list of all emails and decide to access one, and in the mean time you have received email, the chances are that you won't be able to read that email! The next problem is how to deal with keeping a copy of sent emails for your "sent items" folder. If you just use the Java Mail API, the only solution for getting a mail into your email server so that it…
