[Kde-pim] SyncML meeting - conclusions

[Marco Garatti]

Hi all,

before sharing my thoughts, let me introduce myself for the ones who don't 
know me. My name is Marco and I work at Funambol where I am technically 
responsible for 3 Java sync clients that we have in our product. I also have a 
pretty long C/C++ experience and most of all I have been a KDE user for many 
years now. Being a KDE user without sync application, I worked half a day to 
have a reasonably working application to sync contacts and calendar via SyncML 
(based on Funambol API). This prototype helped Riccardo to create Akunambol 
0.1. 

[....]
> enable/disable large parts of the UI code. And it may not even make sense
> as all SyncEvo is a superset of Funambol, where the former (AFAIK) still
> provides an API that is similar to the latter. It is understandable that
> you don't want to scrap your baby to go for a different (but superior)
> solution.

The goal of this thread is certainly not to establish if SyncEvo is better or 
worse than Funambol, but I find your statement a bit unfair. What do you mean 
by "superior". From what perspective? Are you talking about the 
implementation, the user experience of the final product, the number of 
platforms supported, the number of deployments? Are you sure SyncEvo is 
superior in all these regards? Anyway, I have no interest at discussing this 
further, just wanted to say that a statement like yours in the context of this 
email, without any detail supporting your thesis, is a bit unfair.

>From the discussion I seem to understand you dislike Riccardo proposal of 
abstracting a synchronization engine, so that multiple implementations can be 
plugged into Akunambol. There is certainly some complexity associated to this, 
but this is a concept used in many other applications and I think we could let 
Riccardo try to specify such a component/interface and see how it turns out. 
Tightly coupling Akunambol to just one synchronization engine may prove to be 
restrictive in the future. Suppose one day there will be an engine which is 
much better than both Funambol and SyncEvo, at that point having a backend 
concept may help at using such a new technology.

About what's the KDE standard sync application, I know it is entirely a 
discussion that shall take place in the KDE community. So I have no much to 
say. But as a KDE user, I think it is really depressing that as of today there 
is basically no sync option available. So I beg you, make a decision, a plan 
and provide users a solution to sync via SyncML soon :)

Cheers,
Marco
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