Re: [Opensync-devel] A more radical approach: Kill the mozilla-sync plugin ??

[Henrik /K. <he...@ka...>]

Thanks for your comments, Daniel!

Daniel Gollub wrote:
> On Saturday 24 October 2009 02:07:02 pm Henrik /KaarPoSoft wrote:
> [...]
>   
>> Following up on my earlier posts, here is my latest, crazy idea: Kill
>> the mozilla-sync plugin.
>>
>>
>> As mentioned before, the current design is flawed (using not-thread-safe
>> functions from Mozilla in threads), does not work with Thunderbird 3,
>> and is a nightmare to port between platforms - even between different
>> linux distros.
>>
>> Instead of using more development time on the mozilla-sync plugin,
>> syncing Mozilla could be accomplished by
>> - using the syncml-http-server plugin in OpenSync
>> - using the Funambol Thunderbird extension
>> (https://mozilla-plugin.forge.funambol.org/)
>>     
>
> How complicated would be the setup to get this kind of sync working?
>   
Well, I have verified that the two can talk in the first place.
Since they are both SyncML it "should" work, so I hope fixing the 
problems should not be too difficult.
> I wonder if this would allow kind of a out-of-the box setup?
>   
run osynctool
launch mozilla
press funambol button in mozilla.
(However, a better GUI would be needed - see below)
> When Armin and others decided to implement a IPC system in OpenSync they also 
> introduced this three  "ProcessStartTypes" for plugin:
>
>  - thread (default)
>  - process (fork - runs in the osplugin wrappe process)
>  - external (communication via FIFO)
>
> The later one was iirc the idea to be used for applications like thunderbird 
> or mozilla, which didn't provide any public API or easy to handle API to sync.
>
> so if the funambol thunderbird extension doesn't work out ... whabt about 
> writing an "OpenSync extension" for thunderbird?
>
> This extension is more or less a OpenSync plugin living inside this extension. 
> This extension would then communicate with the OpenSync framework via a fifo 
> ... ipc/fifo setup is all handled by the OpenSync API - AFAIK.
>   
Yes, that is certainly also something I was thinking about.
> Unfortuantely there is no real-life example yet, but the code for those 
> external plugins exists. Need to check if i can make up an example out of 
> testcases ...
>   
The lack of documentation/example is one of the things holding me back 
from this approach.
> Or would this be no option for you?
> I could imagine something like this would allow simpler setup ... since you 
> don't have to setup things like an local IP connection or so. For an regular 
> users this would be a bit confusing to configure a "network" connection to 
> talk to a local running application - right?
>   
Technically this is no problem. syncml-http-server and Funambol handles 
this already.
>   
>> Then there is the question of GUI...
>>
>> blueZync is a GUI for OpenSync in Mozilla.
>> It does not suffer from the mozilla-sync design flaw or Thunderbird 3
>> incompatibility, but is still difficult to port, and not really
>> satisfactory.
>> I am thinking about killing this one as well, and maybe work on a GTK+
>> replacement for kitchensync.
>>     
>
> Acutally you would work on a replacement of MultiSync-0.90 - which is a 
> OpenSync GTK gui .. currently AFAIK unmaintined.
>
> There is also gnome-sync-tool you might want to have a look at.
>   
I never used any of those tools. But I will have a look.
> [...]
> You don't have to use KitchenSync as _the_ ideal OpenSync GUI. You could also 
> write some Mozilla plugin(s) which just setup a sync with dedicated plugins - 
> e.g. Mobile-Sync-Plugin for Mozilla
>
> Which provides a very simple UI to setup a group of a mozilla-plugin and the 
> syncml-obex-client and maybe some other (synce, gnokii-sync, ...) just 
> dedicated for mobile syncing ... so you don't have to write a UI to create 
> generic groups for all available plugins and so.
>
> Just an UI which provides a search-bluetooth-device UI or so and setups a 
> group with the best fitting plugin on the fly. But the end-user doesn't see 
> anything that there got a group with member created - your app doesn't need to 
> support multiple groups and so ...
>
>   
This is exactly what blueZync is doing today.
Even with multiple groups and generic plugin handling.

But the problem is that I have to drag along a complicated XPCOM C++ 
interface to call the OpenSync functions and receive the callbacks.
It kind-of works today, but it is not nice, and not easily portable 
(actually, it IS portable, but getting the prerequisites (Mozilla SDK 
etc) in place is a mess.

/Henrik