[Owncloud] GSoC Sync Client - Server Component

[kunal]

Hi all,
for the last few weeks my mentor (Riccardo) and I had been evaluating
various server and client SDKs and components that we could use to
implement synchronization.

Both of us and I am sure all of you'll would concur that we must use
standards compliant technologies to implement the sync. So we have
decided to use a SyncML (an OMA standard sync Protocol) compliant server
and client infrastructure.

The Client component would be developed using the Funambol C++ SDK.
For the Client to work , we must use a SyncML compliant server.
We have two options here :
1. Mooha SyncML server
	Pros:
	1. Completely written in PHP
        2. Uses MySQL as a backend
Because of the above two points , it would integrate with ownCloud very
well.
	Cons:
	1. Provides sync only for Contacts and Calendars.
	2. Relatively new project, in its early stages, only supports
calendars, notes, contacts as of now.
	3. A very small developer community , 3 developers. hence new
 feature requests and bug reports get resolved very slowly.
    	4. While synchronizing with akunambol ( a SyncML client) the server
behaves erratically. (Gives errors, even when the data has got
synchronized to the database successfully).

2. Funambol SyncML server:
    Pros:
    1. Very Mature, version 10 (currently).
    2. Very large developer community and a large contributor community.
    3. Supports a lot of Synchronization types like Contacts, Calendar,
 Files, E-mail etc.
    4. Has a very mature Client SDK (in C++ and Java).

I would like to point out that Funambol has a lot of mobile clients
(android , iphone, blackberry) which make the solution very widely
adoptable and convenient. These are just sync clients and do not clash
with Bartek's work.

(These clients would work with any syncML compliant server , including
Mooha. But they are much more tested with Funambol).

    Cons:
    1. The Server is written in Java. So the integration with the
existing infrastructure would be slightly more time consuming as
compared to Mooha.
    2. Tomcat takes up around 40 to 50MB of RAM . Though most VPS
providers provide much more than this but this leaves slightly lesser
RAM for other apps of owncloud.

I personally would want to use Funambol for the server but before
starting anything I would like to take the consent of the community
members.

Please do share your comments / suggestions.


-- 
regards
-------
Kunal Ghosh
Dept of Computer Sc. & Engineering.
Sir MVIT
Bangalore,India

permalink: member.acm.org/~kunal.t2
Blog:kunalghosh.wordpress.com
Website:www.kunalghosh.net46.net