Intended audience

This document is intended for people who want to understand how the core of Dithaka are used for the mail forum: Dithaka-Base

Introduction

The basic structure of Dithaka-Base that are used to handle the mail forum will be discussed in the following sections using some class and collaboration diagrams.

Overview of Core classes

The core classes of Dithaka-Base, that are used to provide mail forum processing, will be discussed in this section.

Basic Dithaka class diagram for the forum-package

The core classes are:

Forum: The Forum class represents a mail forum. It is used to associate messages with a forum. The forum can be associated with a specific topic.

Message The Message class represents a text message that is associated with a specific forum.

Conversation: Messages that are related or replies to messages are associated with each other by the use of a Conversation.

UserMailPreferences: UserMailPreferences are used to store mail preferences of the forum. Currently there is only two:

• Normal mail delivery or digests. This is set but not implemented in the back-end
• Receive receipts or not. This is set but not implemented in the back-end

This class could be replaced by MailForumSettings

SubscriptionService: SubscriptionService is used by the Forum class to manage the users subscribing and unsubscribing to the forum.

MailGenerator: MailGenerator is not shown on the figure above but is a critical class when the messages needs to be sent to all subscribers as e-mail. The MailGenerator class creates the Mail object and sends it on to the SMPT mail server, in this case James. James handles the mail and it passes through some matcher and mailets which is like filters. These add and remove some information to the mail and sends it on the the final recipients. These recipients are the subscribers of the forum.