Re: [Opensync-devel] SyncML plugin

[Patrick O. <pat...@gm...>]

On Do, 2010-12-16 at 23:14 +0100, Quentin Denis wrote:
> Well, it seems quite obvious for me that direct syncing between the phone and 
> another group-member should be possible. That is why OBEX seems necessary to 
> me, or how should I understand how libsynthesis is implemented in practice? A 
> contact of mine, called Dinesh, has quite a good knowledge about this, 
> especially since he wrote the syncml-plugin for syncevolution recently.

I'm not sure what Dinesh really said about his involvement, but he did
not write a SyncML plugin. SyncEvolution already supported direct
synchronization with phones via SyncML/OBEX/Bluetooth before Dinesh got
involved. He focused on adding Akonadi support (based on a prototype
backend that I had written earlier) and a KDE GUI.

To answer your question about OBEX transport + libsynthesis:
libsynthesis does not contain any kind of transport mechanism. It
consumes and produces SyncML messages. The platform specific application
on top of libsynthesis is responsible for sending/receiving these
messages. SyncEvolution has these transports for HTTP and OBEX, both for
initiating and accepting sessions (SyncML client and server).

>  He 
> gave me the following answer which might interest you:
> 
> "Hey Quentin,
[...]
> Also, you might be interested to check this project called Buteo Sync(in
> Meego's Website), which is the main synchronization framework for MeeGo...
> and it replaced syncevolution for MeeGo..
> currently it includes open source sync framework for:
> 1) Contacts
> 2) Calender
> 3) MPT (media transfer protocol: for music syncing)
> 
> and a closed source sync framework for:
> 1) SMS , MMS
> 2) Bookmarks etc..
> 
> Today i ve talked to the Nokia engineers behind this and they said it would
> be totally open sourced really soon, once after they make it quite stable.

All components that Nokia intends to contribute are already open source,
as far as I know. I'm involved in anything related to Buteo and MeeGo as
part of my job at Intel. Some things that are missing for a complete
solution for deployment on a phone are kept proprietary, see
http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3868

> It
> So you might want to look at this for the actual direction of
> KMobileTools.(To enable KDE to )
> Its a quite good and interesting project for us since:
> 1) it is Qt Based
> 2) maintained by Nokia and Intel!!!

Buteo was written and is maintained primarily by Nokia. It is also not
currently tested with anything in MeeGo. Configurations for Mobical and
Google Contacts finally exist, but no real interoperability testing with
them was done in MeeGo (see http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3869).

Direct syncing with phones is something that Nokia has demoed with Nokia
phones, but it is not a feature that is planned for MeeGo. The current
code does not work with non-Nokia phones (for example, phone must
combine calendar+tasks, which Sony Ericsson phones don't).

The biggest gap in Buteo (compared to SyncEvolution/Synthesis) is that
it contains no code to handle conflicts and data conversion. Anyone
writing a data plugin for it has to implement that part himself. See my
LinuxCon 2010 presentation, which I created together with the Buteo
developers:
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/linuxcon2010/ohly

-- 
Bye, Patrick Ohly
--  
Pat...@gm...
http://www.estamos.de/