Webmail 'Beta Pushes'

Posted by Pat on 08/30/2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I've been talking about for quite some time, now that our new webmail platform has been released, we're going to take the "release early and often" approach to software development. As opposed to always taking on enormous projects that take forever to complete, we're going to break all projects down into small chunks and get the smaller chunks out the door as quickly as possible.

Here is how we're going to move forward for the foreseeable future, with regards to software development around our webmail platform:

1. As we develop new features and enhancements, we're going to initially upload them to our beta site. Feel free to login there at any time, but realize, it's just a beta site.

2. Once the latest fixes, features, and enhancements are ready to go live, we'll release what we call a "beta push" which means we're pushing the new stuff from beta to the live environment.

We're going to release Beta Push 1 later today, which includes close to 30 fixes, enhancements, and new features. I will write about the primary features that can be found in this release once they go live.

Comments

The webmail interface is much faster than the slower/older version. But I still see that beta.webmail.us taking it's time to load misc css/image/js files on many requests and not really serving static content all that fast. Have you guys tried some alternative and even-driven web servers like litespeed?

Posted by: Diego at August 30, 2006 08:22 PM

@Diego: We do have a set of servers that are dedicated to serving static content. As for various files:

css: this is an area we are currently improving.

js: you should only see js files requested one time per version. after that they should be cached. there are exceptions on a few popup pages, but they will be converted in the near future.

images: we set a fairly high expire time on images, so they should be caching. if they are not, i tend to lean towards a browser issue.

We have not tried litespeed, but we are constantly working to server static content faster and more efficiently, so it is a possibility sometime in the future.

Posted by: Mike Bulman at August 30, 2006 09:44 PM

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