[dot] Akonadi Hacking Meeting

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1177506111/

From: Tobias König <tokoe at kde.org>
Dept: meesa-do-not-know
Date: Wednesday 25/Apr/2007, @06:01

Akonadi Hacking Meeting
=======================

     Last weekend was not only the time for the KMail Hacking Days but
also for the second Akonadi· [http://pim.kde.org/akonadi/] Hacking
Meeting in Berlin, Germany.

     7 KDE-PIM developers came together for 2 days at the KDAB
[http://www.kdab.com] offices in Berlin's Kreuzberg district and
continued to improve Akonadi, the personal information data storage for
KDE 4.

     Meeting the other developers in real life and discussing issues
face to face always helps to find new solutions and implement crucial
features in a short period of time.


     The first big step was to make the setup of Akonadi as easy as
possible. Now you just have to start the 'akonadi_control' application
and all other components of Akonadi, including the external MySQL
process, are started automatically so you can begin to read and write
data from/to the storage right away.

     To be able to test the functionality effectively the application
'akonadiconsole' (which is supposed to be a test application only) was
extended to support displaying type specific information. Only a few
lines of code later it was able to show contacts stored in Akonadi
    [http://wgess16.dyndns.org/~tobias/static/dot_akonadi_model.png]
     Under the hood the code of Akonadi was cleaned up and the API of
libakonadi improved for easier extension in the future.

     Also the roadmap of the project was refined and the next steps to
take clarified, so on the server side the API of the resources (that are
plugins which communicate between the Akonadi storage and external
sources e.g. groupware servers) will be simplified to allow 3rd party
developers to create new resources by just reimplementing 3 virtual
methods.·

     On the client side the next steps will include writing models
[http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/model-view-programming.html] for all kind
of PIM data (e.g. mails, contacts, events, todos) which fetch their data
from Akonadi. This task is covered by a Google Sommer of Code project
[http://code.google.com/soc/kde/appinfo.html?csaid=FEC28979B7F91E04].
Another step will be to write components like editors and viewers which
work standalone with the Akonadi storage and provide features like
live-update on changes and conflict resolution, new developers for these
tasks are always welcome :)

     In the picture below you can see the participants of this meeting:
    [http://wgess16.dyndns.org/~tobias/static/dot_akonadi_group.jpg]
     From left to right:
    * Ingo Kloecker: KMail hacking
    * Cornelius Schumacher: KOrganizer hacking
    * Till Adam: Akonadi storage
    * Robert Zwerus: Akonadi database storage
    * Tobias Koenig: Akonadi storage and libraries
    * Frank Osterfeld: Akregator and feeds model hacking
    * Volker Krause: Akonadi poster boy :)


     All in all it was a great meeting at a great location with great
people.

     If you are interested in helping the Akonadi team with development,
documentation writing or artistic work, feel free to contacts us via
mail [kde-pim at kde.org] or join the IRC channel #kontact on irc.kde.org.