Regarding GSoC Plasmoid data caching project

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Tuesday 30 March 2010 09:13:58 shruti jain wrote:
> I am a final year student of computer science. I intend to contribute to
> plasma and see GSoC 2010 as a good starting point for that. I have
> participated in GSoC 2009 as well. I am proficient in C/C++ and network
> programming as well. I have also been the system administrator of my
> university.
> I am interested in Plasmoid data caching project. I am doing research on
> speculative execution at my university. It has a similar concept of
> starting execution on cached data while the most recent copy of data is
> not available from the server and avoid downloading from server if the
> data has not changed since it was cached.
> 
> Presently, plasmoids such as news etc do not show anything when Plasma
> netbooks are disconnected from the network. The idea is to use the cached
> data when network is not available and refresh when network is available.
> I think that the project can be extended to incorporate collaborative
> caching as well. Even if the network is present, we can take the data from
> caches of other clients on the network. This reduces the load on the server
> from where the data(like news) is being fetched. This also fetches a more
> recent data in case of proxy failures.
> 
> Please send me your comments on the idea and any suggestions to improve the
> same.

Two things that are probably interesting:

- Akonadi: can access and transparently cache arbitrary types of data

- Network status notifier: can tell you when an internet connection becomes available

Combining those two things can get you quite far already.
-- 
sebas

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