[Owncloud] Re: GSoC Sync Client - Server Component

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 20.06.2011, at 20:41, Robin Appelman wrote:

> On Monday 20 June 2011 22:22:09 kunal wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> While funambol is certainly a better server, I would hate to see a dependency 
> on java for the hosting.
> 
> In the current state mooha doesn't provide what we need but it's at least a 
> base to work with.


Yes. The main point of ownCloud is that it runs on any webspace without special requirements like a daemon or root access.

So java is not an option at the moment. The server should be pure PHP because this is supported by most hosters and servers.

Cheers
Frank



--
Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org