Liaison & MozNGW project background
Whilst we've always been a fan of the Novell GroupWise server components for their speed, reliability and security. We wanted a fully featured cross platform GroupWise client, that was fast, extendable and simple to use. Liaison is designed to achieve all of these things and more, our goal is not to just be the best client for GroupWise, but the best groupware client period. By leveraging the power of the Mozilla project we believe this goal to be well within our grasp.
For the record, Java at Redback is a four-letter word, as we firmly believe that Java provides a solution to very little, and when you need to do cross platform, there's usually a better way.
The lead developer originally advocated this solution to Novell as a replacement for the GroupWise 32 Bit client in January 2002. Originally suggesting using a different cross-platform base - the Opera Web Browser, as at that point the Mozilla components were bloated and slow and XUL was immature, even if they were standards compliant. For historical interest the original discussion document is here, along with an architectural overview here and here.
Whilst the original 'Mozilla for GroupWise' codebase never really met the lofty goals in the concept document, the newer Liaison codebase has many of the issues we encountered in the original MozNGW work ironed out and so many of these features like direct connections to SQL stores and many others are appearing.
Instant Messenger - 'Jymp'
Liaison will not support GroupWise messenger but implementing our own IM module called "Jymp". This implements the XML based IETF XMPP Protocol formally the "Jabber" protocol. For more information read the "Jabber" and XMPP Overview.
Mozilla background & history
By the middle of 1998, the "browser wars" had been won by Microsoft, and Netscape Communications was fast going out of business. Netscape's web browser - Netscape Communicator and Navigator, the forbearer of all modern web browser software, had been beaten by Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer. The irony was that neither were particularly good pieces of software, not compliant with many of the W3C specifications, and in fact Internet Explorer 6 - even today is based on original code from an ancient web browser concept called NSCA Mosaic (look in "Help > About" under IE6!).
Netscape responded in the only way they really could, if Microsoft was going to give away it's web browser, Netscape would go one better and not only give away the web browser, but give away the source code as well. The Mozilla Project was formed to turn Netscape's browser into an Open Source standards compliant free browser. A fascinating insight into the background of Netscape's decision can be read here.
Unfortunately, the Mozilla team soon discovered that it wasn't so much a case of giving the source code away, as throwing the source code away. Navigator was a hodge-podge of hacks, fixes and poorly written code, that had "evolved" due to the speed with which Netscape had been developing Navigator, Mozilla soon decided to start from scratch - 'Project SeaMonkey' was born.
By 2002 the last milestones of SeaMonkey were being released, and whilst it's HTML rendering engine (Project Gecko) was fast and standards compliant, with the full browser now installing at 18Mb; it was slow and rather bloated. A sub-team at Mozilla decided they wanted a fast "browser only" solution, without the bloat and love handles, but with the cool technology Mozilla had developed such as Gecko, XUL, the Javascript engine and a great many others. See www.mozilla.org/projects/ for a comprehensive list. This was first released as "Phoenix" in late 2002, and has since morphed through a number of name changes into Mozilla Firefox.
Firefox is without doubt the fastest, most reliable and standards compliant web browser on the planet. We challenge anyone to use Firefox for a week and not "uninstall" (if only) Internet Explorer at the end of it. It is a supreme irony that Microsoft will ultimately lose the "browser wars" as a direct result of their own strategy, Mozilla is what it is today due to Microsoft.
One of the many great features of Mozilla Firefox is it's ability to apply both themes (styles) and extensions (addins). Mozilla for GroupWise is; at it's simplest a theme and extension for Firefox. As a result of this Mozilla for GroupWise is completely customisable both by end users and any 3rd parties, so true GroupWise Themes and extensions are a cinch. For those tempted, Redback will be releasing a number of themes with MozNGW - one of which will be a Microsoft Outlook theme!
