[dot] The Big Kolab Kontact Interview - Part II

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1107904670/

From: Fabrice Mous <fabricemous at kde.nl>
Dept: controlling-your-information-flow
Date: Wednesday 09/Feb/2005, @00:17

The Big Kolab Kontact Interview - Part II
=========================================

   As promised [http://dot.kde.org/1106909457/] KDE Dot News brings you
the second part of the two-part interview about Kontact
[http://www.kontact.org/] and Kolab [http://www.kolab.org/]. This part
focuses on Kontact, the Personal Information Management suite for KDE
made with the combination of KMail, KOrganizer, KAddressbook and other
programmes.



     As Kontact is the Kolab client on the KDE platform how did Kontact
happen?  Which parties were involved and were there any sponsors
involved?

     Cornelius Schumacher: Kontact actually has a long history. It
started as an experiment in 2000  under the name Twister
[http://webcvs.kde.org/kdepim/twister/], was reintroduced in 2002 as
Kaplan [http://webcvs.kde.org/kdepim/kaplan/] and finally  started to
become what it is today in 2003. Maybe the biggest single  step to make
Kontact happen was Don Sanders porting KMail to provide a KPart for
integration in Kontact.

     The nice thing about Kontact is that it is only a very thin
integration  layer on top of the existing PIM applications which doesn't
sacrifice  the ability of the application to run stand-alone. So most
integration  is happening in the applications themselves and not in the
Kontact  framework. Details about the technical and social aspects of
Kontact as an application integration framework can be found in the
paper  I presented
[http://www.kontact.org/files/kontact_freenix_paper.pdf] at the USENIX
conference 2004.

     What groupware servers does Kontact support?

     Cornelius Schumacher: In addition to Kolab it supports eGroupware
[http://www.egroupware.org/],  SUSE OpenExchange Server
[http://www.novell.com/products/openexchange/] and more recently support
has been added for the OpenGroupware server.
 [http://www.opengroupware.org/]
     It also supports iCalendar over HTTP. That's what Apple iCal  uses.
It's hardly groupware, but it's useful for a lot of nice things  (see
e.g. http://www.icalshare.com) [http://www.icalshare.com].

     Kontact now also supports Novell GroupWise
[http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/]. Thanks to the quality  of
the KDE framework it took us only one week to implement the basic 
functionality.

     There is also some basic support for MS Exchange.  We will
certainly see support for even more groupware servers in the future.

     What happened to support for Exchange2000 calendering in Kontact?

     Tobias Koenig: At the moment we have a halfway working solution for
calendaring with Exchange2000. Since Ximian has released the source code
of their Exchange connector it would be quite easy to write a connector
for Kontact as well, but it seems no KDE developer is willing to do so
at this moment.

     Cornelius Schumacher:  It is not missing much, so indeed if
somebody would step up and take care of this code we would have Exchange
support in Kontact in no time.  For KDE 3.4 this has been rewritten with
a cleaner code base and is ready for trying out.

     Why did you choose to reuse existing applications like KOrganizer,
KPilot,  KMail, KAddressbook [http://www.kaddressbook.org/], KNotes,
KNode, etc .. for Kontact instead of building a new  application from
scratch?

     Tobias Koenig: KMail is the best Open Source e-mail program
existing today and with KOrganizer and KAddressBook we already had two
other important parts of a PIM solution. So why should we start from
scratch? With KParts, XML-GUI and DCOP, KDE offers an incredibly cool
framework which made it quite easy to integrate these applications
without throwing away existing and well tested code, so it was clearly
the way to go.

     Cornelius Schumacher: Tobias is right. All these existing
applications are great on their own.  They have healthy  code bases and
developer communities. To throw this away for a new  application written
from scratch would have cost us many years of  development effort. The
KDE component technologies make it so easy  to integrate the
applications there is no doubt that the Kontact  approach is the right
way.

     What kind of syncing technology is used now in Kontact? What
happened to Kandy?
 [http://kandy.kde.org/]
     Tobias Koenig: For KDE 3.3 we introduced KitchenSync as a syncing
framework for Kontact and every other KDE application. KitchenSync is
plugin based, so every developer can implement their own plugin to add
syncing support for new mobile devices.

     Cornelius Schumacher: We already have KPilot
[http://www.kpilot.org], which does a really nice job synchronizing Palm
OS  devices with KDE, and KitchenSync. KitchenSync is supposed to be the
 future all-purpose syncing solution, but it still has a long way to go 
before that becomes reality.

     Tobias Koenig: The development of Kandy has nearly stopped, as soon
as the KitchenSync API has been stabilised, Kandy will be rewritten as a
KitchenSync plugin.

     Cornelius Schumacher: That's also the reason why I didn't spent
much time on it as  a stand-alone application anymore. Some time ago I
received a large patch for Kandy, So it looks  like it could get some
life of its own again.

     Are there any plans to integrate other syncing technologies so it
can sync with  types of handhelds other than just Palm Pilots?

     Tobias Koenig: Of course, there is already a half working plugin to
sync devices with the Qtopia/OPIE environment and support for SyncML is
also in progress.

     Cornelius Schumacher: There might be some opportunities for 
working together with other projects on some common syncing framework 
(e.g. the OpenSync initiative
[http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/OpenSync] on freedesktop.org)
[http://www.freedesktop.org], but it's hard to  keep track of what's
happening in these areas. There are just too many  and too special
projects.

     How is Kitchensync progressing and how will it address syncing (in
the future). What possiblities does it offer?

     Tobias Koenig: With the Qtopia/OPIE, MultiSync
[http://multisync.sourceforge.net] and SyncML plugins, we'll be able to
sync nearly all kinds of mobile devices. PIM data from Palm Pilots can
be synchronized with the KDE desktop via KPilot, but we plan to
integrate it into KitchenSync for KDE 4.x.

     Cornelius Schumacher: As KitchenSync is supposed to become a
generic syncing framework which can  easily be extended with new plugins
to support any specific device. The  KDE 3.3 release contains an initial
version which is able to  synchronize addressbooks and calendars between
KDE desktops. There is  more to come, but as syncing is a really hard
and ugly problem it's not  progressing as fast as we all would like to
see.

     What do the Kolab and Kontact projects need the most now?

     Tobias Koenig: We are always in need of developers and users for
testing. Kontact needs a lot of usability improvements, with the help of
OpenUsability.org [http://www.openusability.org/] we are currently
working on it, further help is always appreciated.

     Cornelius Schumacher: Contributors. There are so many nice ideas
which could be implemented,  if we only had some more people doing
actual work. The KDE framework  makes it possible to do development in
an extremely efficient way. It's  amazing to see how far we have come
with Kontact when taking account  how few people we are and that most of
the work is done in our  spare time. That's only made possible by the
high quality of the  framework and the unique spirit of the KDE
community. It's inspiring to  work on Kontact and it's also a lot of
fun. Everybody is welcome to  join us and share the experience.

     Bernhard Reiter: Our next challenge will be to build a commercial
(Free Software) infrastructure behind Kolab to grow it in the market and
go the next steps with development. This requires people to be fair and
give back financially some of the value they get when deploying Kolab,
especially in larger installations.

     Where can people get more information about Kolab and Kontact?

     Cornelius Schumacher: Point your browser to www.kontact.org
[http://www.kontact.org] and  www.kolab.org.
 [http://www.kolab.org]