Hi Guys
I'm one of the Conduit developers and I'd just like to get your feelings on where Conduit and/or OpenSync fit in to this. I understand that you guys are heading the charge on this, but especially wanted to draw your attention to Conduit. We are one of a handful of projects that have been already working with 'online desktop' goals in mind. It would be a shame if we couldn't work together when we have the same, or very similar, goals. So the purpose of my writing is to share our vision. I want to see how it compliments what you are trying to achieve and find out how we can best work together (and not end up duplicating our efforts!). Here is the state of Conduit for those of you not familiar with our work. For the Tomboy users... Conduit is currently able to sync your notes to an iPod, Evolution Memos or to Backpackit.com. Oh, and to any folder that GnomeVFS can see. Local, SSH or otherwise. I've not tried it myself, but it looks like you can also sync notes to Box.net... For those braver than average, running from SVN trunk gives you the ability (with some luck!) to sync your notes, contacts, and soon any type of data, to other Conduit instances over the network using a simple XML-RPC protocol with avahi discovery. (There is a low res video of laptop to laptop tomboy and evolution sync on my blog @ www.unrouted.co.uk) Ongoing work will see (or was originally designed to see) a "Conduit Server" emerge that you can run on a spare machine or, like me, you'll install it on your VPS/VM box. As your notes are synced from Tomboy on your laptop to the server they can be pushed out to other machines connected to the server. The server can use multiple plugins for storage - it could be flat files, it could be a database, it could be Google's BigTable. It's storing using the same plugins as normal Conduit - so the server could really be just passing everything back to Box.net!! The Conduit Server was then to lead on to a Django, TurboGears or otherwise Python based web app for viewing (and editing) your data online. Hosting it was a problem for us but we were hoping to get interest from the distros on that front. Also, as quite a small python app it would have been (hopefully) VPS friendly. This is pretty much defunct with online.gnome.org, though I don't think I could run my own personal "gnome online" on my VPS :)) We would like to see Conduit on other platforms - so you can sync the notes using your Mac, ******* PC, or even your N800. (A native N800 port is likely to be the first of these). We are working with OpenSync devs to allow their plugins to work in Conduit, and eventually the use of their sync engine if desired. This will bring support for more devices (which is outside the scope of Online Desktop discussions, but worth mentioning). This includes the possibility of over-the-air phone sync... We aren't a sync GUI, we are a sync platform. Our dbus service provides sync for the whole desktop. An example, our API allows tomboy the option of syncing without involving the Conduit GUI at all. Tomboy can discover which targets are compatible with its "Note" datatype, create a group for that and sync. Similarly one click photo upload to Flickr,Picasa,Smugmug,iPod using eog is also in progress. As a project, I think we are good citizens. We have a history of working with other teams to enable sync. That includes bug reports and patches to Tomboy, patches to libgpod and even patches to SynCE. We maintain the python bindings for evolution, which we hope to eventually move upstream. If it's important to you to know how deployed we are, I know Conduit to be present in Foresight, Debian unstable, Ubuntu Universe (Gutsy) and Fedora Extras. Not really sure about the others... We are also working with one distro to enable Conduit "out of the box" in their next major release. So that's Conduit from a (mostly) notes perspective. In the online desktop climate, where do we fit in? * We can provide sync logic and conflict resolution. Intelligent client, server (or client for server) just needs a storage API. * We can provide "Dataproviders" for online.gnome.org services (and it should be a lot easier than Flickr and its frobs and tokens!). * Apps like Cheese can use our one-way sync api to push images to Flickr, and get online.gnome.org and other web services for free. I saw this in another e-mail: > So it looks like we'll need to duplicate the work here, although > putting additional pressure on Google to open source it is also a good > idea. We have a guy working on bookmark sync for Epiphany, Simply Bookmark and Delicious to scratch his own itch :)... I don't know how far along he is though. An online.gnome.org backend would be quite easy too I imagine... So what are your thoughts? Also, could Conduit (at least the dbus part of it) merge in someway with the ideas of the "Online Desktop Engine"? Thanks for your time John Carr _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
