[Opensync-devel] Comparison between OpenSync and SyncEvolution

[Bjoern R. <bjo...@go...>]

Hi,

I am currently at the KDE PIM Meeting and yesterday I attended to a talk
about SyncEvolution and syncing in general. Patrick Ohly had presented
some slides about SyncEvolution and I also talked to him in private.
Afterwards it became clear to me that there are some differences between
OpenSync and SyncEvolution that I want to share with the list. Patrick
please correct me if I am wrong in any comment and also if I forgot some
features.

The general approach of SyncEvolution was and is to solve current
syncing problems. That's completely different to OpenSync. OpenSync
wants to be a general framework for mostly all PIM synchronization
problems. Therefore our architecture is more complicated and difficult
to understand. SyncEvolution is based on syncml and uses syncml to
communicate with their peers. In OpenSync syncml is only one possible
client. SyncEvolution also has a dbus daemon and provides a GUI.
OpenSync is only concentrating on the framework/library and does provide
osynctool for testing. There is no dbus integration in OpenSync at all.
SyncEvolution is well integrated into the gnome world (e.g. using eds as
backend). If I understood Patrick correctly SyncEvolution isn't able to
sync with different backends at the same time (at the moment). The
OpenSync architecture always supported different backends/peers (e.g.
evolution and gnokii) and is loosely coupled to syncml. With OpenSync it
is also possible to sync different backends/peers at the same time
because of the sync group feature. In OpenSync the sync plugin are able
to run in different threads, processes, etc. OpenSync contains an IPC
layer and plugins don't have to care about that in detail. This feature
is completely missing in SyncEvolution. In my opinion this is a big
advantage of OpenSync. In the opposite a cool feature of SyncEvolution
is the scriptable data conversion using libsynthesis.

regards
Bjoern