After all these improvements to the IMAP code of tinymail I have put in place all the infrastructure to support incrementally loading the summary view (the thing that shows the headers of your E-mails) while you are downloading it in the background.
Polymer and Telomer do this too by the way. Which is why it looks so fast. On top of that it uses pipelining. This makes it possible to queue multiple commands on the server and then letting it start replying the results for them.
So basically, while using a single connection, Dave managed to allow the user to start downloading and viewing your summary while that user can already start viewing messages too. Using lots of clever techniques, tricks and most importantly a lot knowledge about how IMAP servers work. I would, by the way, hereby like to thank Dave for his help on IMAP while I have been improving things for the last weeks.
The idea is indeed to get tinymail there too. As I said, step by step. I already saw my own hack working in the demo ui of tinymail. It’s however done a little bit too gross to commit this hack somewhere.
But indeed, you click on a folder and the treeview starts getting filled up with headers while downloading is taking place. That, in the end, is what you spoiled users want. Right?
Well, on tinymail-based E-mail clients you will usually see this “fancy effect” only once. After that first time your folder’s summary will have a local state that doesn’t need a lot such changes to get synchronized.
Unless you added really a lot stuff using another IMAP client. And of course while the folder is active and you have a connection you will see the Push E-mail feature in action: new messages will be automatically added to the view too. This should give you the same fancy feeling! Whoohoo.
So that is what you can expect in a near future. This type of features might, however, be for a 2.0 release of the API. I don’t know yet. I’m a.t.m. too focused on coding to worry about releases.
A demo of the hack in action? No sorry, it’s late here in Belgium. Maybe tomorrow. It’s reusing a lot of the code of the Push-Email / IMAP IDLE feature. I posted a demo that shows that a few days ago.