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Re: Idle curiosity -- Time to implement MIME

1993-09-07 19:44:40
How much effort (man months?) did it take to implement a MIME parser?

I integrated the MIME (based on the spec from Atlanta IETF) parser
(read-only) into Sun's Mailtool (User Agent) in about 2 weeks.

Then I spent 2 more weeks to convert Sun's propriertary Mailtool 
attachment format to and from MIME format, but kept the UI and behavior
identical.

Finally, I spent another 2 weeks to allow Mailtool to handle the conversion
between Multipart message to and from non-Multipart message.

By the Santa Fe IETF meeting, I had a working version of Mailtool that could
send/receive MIME message and converted back/forth to Sun's propriertary
attachment format.

The parser must produce a data structure within which the body parts
are attached.  Must be able to produce a new instance of the message
(or any body part) from the data structure.


My parser produced a generalized structure for MIME and Sun's attachment
format.  It used Sun's Classing Engine to map the content-type to the
proper message viewing program.

There must be no policy decisions in the parser on the order of presenting
the body parts; that is decided by other code.


The parser didn't impose any policy on the body parts.  But the Mailtool
(UA) did because I tried to make the seamless integration of MIME into the
Mailtool.  The Mailtool treated the first text body part differently.

Don't include RichText implementation ..

No, I didn't implement RichText.

-Vincent