GSoC updates: the client agent

This follow-up post is about my proceedings for my GSoC project to integrate SyncML support in Akonadi. This consists basically of two parts, a server agent and a client agent. The former allows other devices to talk to your Akonadi server while the latter let’s your Akonadi server speak with others. Quite simple? Not really, SyncML is a complex and error-prone beast. That said, the server component might take some time to be ready, but the client agent is actually useful now. So let’s have a little test session!

The following stuff is pretty low-level, requires some compiler/shell knowledge, a KDE development environment set up and is not intended for end-users. Still there?

Compilation
If you have your KDE development environment up and running, just checkout trunk/playground/pim/syncml from KDE SVN. You need to have libfunambol installed, which you can either compile for yourself from source our use a package from that repository (a patched libsyncml is available too, if you want to build the server agent). Not much to say here, just build and install it.

Setup
If you’ve reached this step you now should be able to add a SyncML client agent in the Akonadi resource configuration control module (system settings -> advanced tab -> akonadi configuration):

If you did so, you should now be presented with the following configuration dialog:

There you can setup the remote server (speak web-service) you want to sync with. Your job is basically to decide what parts of your PIM-data you want to be synced (contacts, calendar, etc.) and how to match the corresponding local Akonadi resource with the remote database on the server. Some more advanced values will be exposed soon, SyncML has gazillions of options available! Here are some possible values to toy with:

myFunambol.com

URL: http://my.funambol.com/sync
username/password: you should register!
contacts remote db: card
events remote db: event
tasks remote db: task
notes remote db: note

ScheduleWorld.com

URL: http://sync.scheduleworld.com/funambol/ds
username/password: you should register!
contacts remote db: card
events remote db: cal
tasks remote db: task
notes remote db: note

Mobical.net

URL: http://www.mobical.net/sync/server
username/password: you should register!
contacts remote db: con
events remote db: cal
tasks remote db: task
notes remote db: vnote

Rumors have it that some Google services are also SyncML-capable but I don’t know the settings needed. Feel free to post a comment if you know something here. As a sidenote, you can actually have multiple agents for several remote sides in parallel.

Showtime!
For now all that stuff lacks a GUI, there’s some initial work on a KControl module but for now we have to communicate via D-Bus with the client agent. The same is true for visual feedback. The agent is able to tell you whether the sync succeeded or not. If you want to know more, you have to watch Akonadi’s debug output for now. Fire up a terminal and enter the following stuff:

$ akonadictl restart
$ qdbus org.freedesktop.Akonadi.Agent.akonadi_syncmlclient_agent_0 / sync

Before you actually try this, be warned! This is unstable code that is still in heavy development and all kind of weird things may happen to your PIM data, so make a backup before you proceed.