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JMAP for Calendars, Contacts and Files Now in Stalwart

(stalw.art)
309 points StalwartLabs | 1 comments | 22 Oct 25 17:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.218s | source
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9dev ◴[22 Oct 25 18:50 UTC] No.45673491[source]▶
While JMAP seems to scratch every itch of a sucker for proper web API design, I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP. Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days? Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange format, IMHO. Then again, a lot of solid thinking went into these things, so there probably are a lot of good reasons that I’m not aware of.

Still, it’s an interesting space, I think.

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1. btown ◴[23 Oct 25 01:13 UTC] No.45677107[source]▶
My hot take is that if the web had been based on binary protocols rather than HTML and JSON, the fragmentation of tooling that can instead be standardized as view-source and network-tabs would have decimated (as in removed 90% of) the hackers that make up this community, and software engineering in general.

There's no magic. Nothing sacred. Nothing that you aren't allowed to understand, intuitively. Nothing where you aren't allowed to imagine "what if it also had X?" The web is yours. The computer is yours. As an industry, we burn some incremental percentage of bandwidth to give you the keys to the kingdom, and to allow you, new developer, to be one of us.

In an age when LLMs feel like magic boxes to tech-minded people new to development, we need this more than ever.