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Dart vs. IP*Works? We've been using Dart for email processing in FogBUGZ, but there seem to be some really subtle timing related bugs in one of the components that we can't reproduce reliably enough to get them to fix it. Now we're considering switching to IP*Works to make this whole problem go away. Does anyone have any experience with the quality of the IP*Works components? I wouldn't want to trade one set of bugs for another. As usual, we're suffering for not rolling our own, but at this point creating a complete MIME email parser from scratch would be an awful lot of work compared to the price of these commercial components...
Joel Spolsky
We use IP*Works just for one use -- to upload files via http, avoiding some ftp problems -- and it works 100% fine. SmartDraw uses it for the same purpose -- to upload diagrams to the SmartDraw.net site to share with others -- and I believe they are 100% satisfied. But we use only one of many parts of IPWorks.
Harvey Motulsky
I'm not familiar with Dart, so this may not serve the same purpose - you may want to check out JMail at:
Philip Dickerson
This is a bit silly, but the only thing I know about IP works is that a few years ago I had a demo version downloaded, and everytime I ran setup in my windows directory I got the IP works setup rather than the windows setup.
Toby Allen
I've used the part of it that lets me take HTML from other pages for a custom traffic route page ( http://www.nscsl.org/traffic/ ). Except for one odd licensing thing my host had after reimaging a server, it's been very stable.
John S.
I've got two IP*Works components running in an application - IPDaemon and FTP. Since February it's processed 5,000 documents without a single error.
Philo
One of my customers is using IP*Works (actually the C++ variant) for Pocket PC development. They are highly satisfied. Good documentation, very stabile. The only problem they had was getting rid of the nag screen (which is part of the demo license). It used to pop up, even after entering the license key.
Michael Vesely
I have used the C++ DLL version, the VB version, and the scripting version. All three work great. I have zero complaints. I have used at least half the components at some time or another. Overall, they're probably the highest-quality third-party components I've ever used.
Troy King
I've used IP*Works on four different platforms: VB6, eVB, .NET and CF.NET for Pocket PC. Mainly tcp, udp and http. These products are very stable and are accompanied by excellent documentation and samples. I have also used there support, and got rapid answers. I had problems with registrations, they use different procedures, although the products are very similar on the different platforms. In short, I've saved lots of time.
Christer Nilsson
If this was a Delphi project, I would recommend you the Indy component set. It is simply outstanding!
John K.
I used the C++ components many years ago. Wrote a TCP and UDP client/app that is still in use today. no problems. Very Solid.
Gregor Brandt
There's a company called ChilkatSoft that makes several types of components. I currently use their XML parser. I subscribed to their mailing list, and I've seen a lot of satisfied people using thier email components and systems.
Hector
I'll second the comment that the Indy components are outstanding. If you had a multi dev-platform shop then it would be worth encapsulating your logic in a Delphi COM component and utilizing them (or having the same done for you).
Dennis Forbes
Not being familiar with either product, I have to ask what are your requirements? Are you just generating emails and sending them? Do you need to process incoming emails?
Rick Childress (www25.brinkster.com/rchildress)
Right now we use POP3 to get email, including secure (SSL) POP3, and need the ability to parse incoming MIME messages and messages with UUENCODED attachments.
Joel Spolsky
Haven't used this personally, but it looks like it meets your reqs.
Rick Childress (www25.brinkster.com/rchildress)
You may also want to check out Dundas Mailer ( http://www.dundas.com/index.aspx?Section=DundasMailer&Body=body.htm ). This is a commercial quality ASP component, and has the added benefit of being free to use. (There may be a license fee to re-distribute it with your application.)
Edward Livingston
Do you want to stay COM or do you want .NET?
Dave Wanta
COM.
Joel Spolsky
Out of curiosity , why do you want to stay COM over .NET?
Daren Dahl
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Our.NetStrategy.html
Joel Spolsky
Hey Joel,
JWA
Started using IP*Works! for Delphi 1 back in 1996, have grown through their 32bit versions and now am using IP*Works! 5 for .NET. Same consistent performance I've experienced for the last 7 years.
Greg
My experience with Ip*Works has been bad. I had a specific need for a secure ftp java bean component which they had. But the product was not mature and was not tested on different platforms. I wasted 2 weeks in talking to them and ultimately wrote the component on my own.
Sri Nivas
I just ran into someone last week who was raving about the product. He said they have used it for 3 years in a commercial product without a single problem. And although I have no personal experience with the product, I do trust this person's opinion.
Marc LaFleur
Back in 2001 we tried to use IP*Works in our application. It was a COM MTA highly scalable but very demanding application. After spending a lot of time to solve the threading issues we had with IP*Works we decided to buy the source code. We had a good laugh because half of their methods had the TBI comment.
coresi
thanks Joel
AK
We use the Delphi IP*Works and have agreat success. We also use the Delphi SSL components without any big issues. We have found a few bugs but the developers at IP*Works return emails promptly and with good solutions or workarounds.
Chris Woodruff
James Nicoll
Are you _sure_ that rolling your own mail/MIME parser would be inefficient? I speak from experience here; I've written just such a beast in Java; it took about two business days to develop and another one to test. JavaMail had misfeatures I couldn't work around, so I slapped the big "NIH" sticker on it and wrote my own. That same parser has been in a commercial product for months now.
Lucas Bergman
James Nicoll
I think Lucas made up a word for the old tried-and-true "It's not a bug, it's a feature" : D
Rick Childress (www25.brinkster.com/rchildress)
I've used IP*Works 4 when it was marketed for PocketPC development. It didn't work. It required the 2.0 IP Stack, which PocketPC 2000 didn't have, and they refused to refund my money. Finally, they gave me version 5, 6 months later, after my project was dead in the water from being so late.
Todd Brooks
I did not make up the word "misfeature": http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/M/misfeature.html
Lucas Bergman
Joel, someone suggested you Indy components, so I give you the link: http://www.nevrona.com/Indy/
Marco Menardi
An open source product that meets your needs today may be better for you than a closed source product that meets tomorrow's needs.
Jeremy Dunck
No kool-aid for me, thx.
Rick Childress (www25.brinkster.com/rchildress)
I have no experience with IP*Works, but I would highly recommend <a href="http://www.mabry.com>Mabry</a> components. They should have what you need.
Russell Davis
I have mixed feelings about IP*Works. I've worked with their components for both Windows and Pocket PC. I don't think their documentation is all that great - it tends to be a list of all the properties, methods and events, without a lot of samples to really get things rolling. (Yes there are some samples, but there never seem to be the ones that I want.)
Avonelle Lovhaug
The QuikSoft objects http://www.quiksoft.com/objects
Christian Mogensen
Have you considered using Microsoft's Collaboration Data Objects (http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/development/55/CDO%20Intro.doc)? I used it to create Web Archive files (.mht; in fact, nothing but MIME-encoded HTML pages along with images it contained), insert them into mail messages as attachments and send them out. CDO supports message parsing, too. And it's a COM object.
Mladen Jablanovic
We are using IP*Works when we found the Indy components that come with Delphi could not handle our needs for SSL security. Our application (we are an ISV) requires client-side authenitication for SSL in certain situations, and Indy apparently does not support this. We spent many weeks trying to get it to work. We then tried the IP*Works component for SSL and it worked within a few hours. We have been happy with them, but have not had much interaction.
Howard Dunlavy
Let me chime in too. I've used IP*Works for a few little projects over the years and it has worked great, as documented, no problems. I've used the ActiveX version with my applications which are typically written in (the cool but rather obscure) CA-Visual Objects.
M. Schumann
Answer to "coresi" (regarding source and TBI) comments.
Gent Hito
Speaking of Indy, IP*Works and Delphi - try Clever Internet Suite v 3.0 - it blows both away then it comes to features, performance and most important stability
Alex
I've tried their SSL component on behalf of a customer. It has some subtle problems with thread safty in relation to the way the windows message pump works. Even when we realised this was the problem in their code we could not seem to find a workaround that worked all the time an on all the OS platforms we support.
Morten Krog
I was once hired to fix/write some code that "absolutely positively" had to be multithreaded and written in C++ (I wish that they could have understood the concept of sunken costs). I ended up using CDONTS for the mail processing after experimenting with Dart and IP*works. I called the end result "spambot" as it was written to send out about 100,000 emails per week: "thank you for your order, the ups tracking # is.." or "thank you for your order, but the credit card has been declined, please call 1-800blahblah" and about 50,000 newsletters also. If they were willing to put up with VB, it could have been written and deployed in 3-5 days. As it was, it took about 4 months, the first month of which was trying to decypher the code that the original consultant wrote port it to Visual C++ (the author wrote it for CBuilder and the company would not purchase CBuilder), then discard all of it, since it could not be made to work. And the last month was working around a memory leak in ado 2.6. Spambot could have been deployed on a 486 if a computer that old could have been found. I am a firm believer in using cheap old computers to partition out tasks.
Peter Lorenzen
One of my former employers make extensive use of the IP*Works components in Delphi applications for email (outgoing, SMTP) and file transfer (incoming, FTP) in around 1999/2000.
Bevan Arps
Took a quick look at TurboPower's IPro, which is now free on sourceforge.net, and it has support for smtp/pop3 and mime. It may cover your needs. I have only used the basic client/server components myself, and they work very well.
Bent Tranberg
I'm a happy IP*Works user. I don't know much about the email components, but one thing that seems to separate /nsoftware from the other offerings discussed in this thread is that they have a very complete IP suite - I've looked at most of the other references here and there's nothing like IP*Works IPPort and IPDaemon which provide out-of-the-box tcp/ip client and server components - way above a 'socket' api. Their IPDaemon in particular has been completely bullet proof for me - and that's with implementing a multi-threaded server app with it. I've written gobs of winsock and unix socket code and this stuff is an absolute dream in comparison. I wrote a client/server app in C++ with these components in less than a day and its been running without problems for a couple of years.
Mac
Hi Joel,
Adrian-Bogdan Andreias
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