[dot] KDE PIM Annual Meeting Pushes Advanced Design, Enterprise Stability

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1170027049/

From: Will Stephenson <wstephenson at kde.org>
Dept: on-the-muddy-banks-of-the-Hase
Date: Sunday 28/Jan/2007, @15:30

KDE PIM Annual Meeting Pushes Advanced Design, Enterprise Stability
===================================================================

   On Friday 14 January 2007, members of the KDE PIM developer group
came together for the fifth year in a row in Osnabrück, Germany to
review the state of the project. Important topics including Akonadi, KDE
PIM maintenance and enterprise usage. A record number of attendees were
welcomed into the Intevation office and made at home by Bernhard Reiter,
Jan-Oliver Wagner and the rest of the team.
     The meeting participants (from left to right): Martin Konold, Tom
Albers, Simon Hausmann,  Bernhard Reiter, Cornelius Schumacher, Volker  
Krause, Till Adam, Ingo Klöcker, Robert Zwerus,  David Jarvie, Frank
Osterfeld, Thorsten Stärk, Will Stephenson, Tobias Koenig, Adriaan de
Groot   [http://static.kdenews.org/danimo/os5_group.jpg]
     The emphasis of this meeting lay in driving the development of
Akonadi [http://pim.kde.org/akonadi/] forward.  With much of the storage
functions implemented, the team's  attention moved to accessing PIM data
and the design of the libakonadi  clients which will connect the cache
to the outside world.  A streamlined  offline caching design and the
issues posed by large volumes of enterprise  PIM data were also
discussed.

     KDE PIM is the Linux client for the Kolab groupware solution
[http://www.kolab.org/], and as such has  many enterprise users who are
supported by the companies making up the Kolab  Konsortium
[http://www.kolab-konsortium.de/en/index.html].  Due to their stability
requirements, most commercial Kolab users  are still using the KDE 3.3
codebase.  A new enterprise branch of the KDE 3.5  PIM module is being
created which will be used as an ultra-stable base for  Kolab users, and
so that Kolab-derived improvements can return to the KDE 3.5  branch.

     Another topic under discussion was the maintenance strategy for KDE
PIM.  PIM  software is a critical component for most KDE users, both as
individuals and  organisations, and as KDE grows in importance it is
important that its  quality is maintained.  Distributions'
representatives, developers and  companies using KDE PIM will in future
use a dedicated list to coordinate PIM  maintenance work, to ensure that
important bugs are solved once and that all  the participants are aware
when a fix is available.

     During the long weekend there was plenty of other activity taking
place.  For  example, KDE PIM software has a tradition of placing
demands on the KDE  platform that lead to improvements benefiting
everyone, and this year's  meeting was no exception: Akonadi uses a
heavily multithreaded design to give  fast access to your PIM data and
this requires the ability to make and  receive D-Bus calls using several
threads and a single D-Bus connection.   Improvements to the QtDBus
[http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/intro-to-dbus.html] bindings'
multithreading behaviour were also discussed, which are now being
implemented.

     The KDE 4 progress of the individual applications was reviewed, so
that  user interface improvements can take place while Akonadi is still
under  development.  A dedicated session to learn about Interview, the
Qt 4 model-view framework, took place on Sunday morning.  In addition,
Till Adam and Martin Konold spent time analysing the safety properties
of disconnected IMAP, while Adriaan de Groot and Cornelius Schumacher
planned to rationalise the KDE PIM group of websites under the Kontact
[http://kontact.kde.org] banner.

     While several of the participants were returning to Osnabrück, some
new faces  were present.  Tom Albers made the hop across the border to
present Mailody [http://www.mailody.net], his new mail application,
which was received enthusiastically, and long-term  PIM contributors
were able to share some of their experience with Tom.  Frank Osterfeld,
the Akregator [http://akregator.kde.org] author, made his first
appearance, and we welcomed Robert Zwerus, a student at the Universiteit
Twente who hopes to work on Akonadi as part of his studies.  One goal of
Akonadi is to make it easier for new authors like Tom to write PIM
applications, by making the features and knowledge developed by the
project over the years available via libakonadi.  The team hopes that
KDE 4 will see a flourishing development of radical uses for PIM data.

     The KDE PIM team would like to thank the KDE e.V. for supporting
the KDE PIM  meeting at Osnabrück with the help of its supporting
members and Trolltech [http://www.trolltech.com].  Our gratitude goes
also to Intevation [http://www.intevation.de] for kindly hosting us
again, and KDAB [http://www.klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se] and the Kolab
Konsortium [http://www.kolab-konsortium.de/en/index.html] for a fine
Mongolian meal.

     The meeting will be followed up in April with a smaller Akonadi
hacking meeting at the KDAB offices in Berlin.