Opensync, Syncml, Qtopia

[Nazar Annagurban]

hei guys,

I have a question regarding using opensync.
Im working on bachelor project which involves syncing qtopia based phone devices with KDE PIM applications.
For this we have chosen to do it over opensync. But we are not quite sure how we can start.
We did some reading at the opensync website (very useful). And my questions are as follows:
qtopia support bluetooth and obex (obex file push and object push services), thats what we are planning to use.
it doesnt have syncml implementation.
will it be easier to implement syncml on the phone side? ( i found the syncml plugin for opensync quite interesting, because it uses syncml over obex - BT or usb, which is quite what we are looking for)
>From the qtopia phone we have direct access to all PIM data, we have the ability to convert the data into XML.
Will then creating a plugin for opensync be an easier way to go?

The reason im looking for an easier implementation is because we are new to this and the bachelor project has a timeframe of 5 weeks. If you guys have any suggestions, please let me know. Because you guys are more familiar with opensync structure, maybe you have better ways i could tackle this problem. If you need any information, i will try my best to answer.

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[Sascha Peilicke-2]

Hi Nazar,

maybe I can help you out, since i've currently finished exactly what you want,
an PIM synchronization application which uses SyncML to communicate with
groupware servers and can share some hints about that.

First of all I wouldn't recommend using libsyncml from the opensync project,
it's a rock-solid (and to my knowledge) very favorable library but it's hard
to get that thing on the greenphone because of it's dependencies. Glibc and
libxml have a footprint around 2.5MB (correct me, but i tested it) without
your app. That's certainly too much for every embedded device, the factor
that it's written in C brings some difficulties with it too, since all the
Qt/Qtopia stuff is C++. You have two other free library options then:

The SyncML C reference implementation:
Seems to be feature-complete (no assumptions about transport) but unmaintained
since 2004, I didn't investigate that really deep because it's almost
non-documented and difficult to understand.

The Funambol C++ Client API:
I chose this one, because it's written C++ (a really big advantage you don't
have to write a wrapper for using it together with Qtopia) and has a
relatively big community behind it. It has drawbacks too, documentation is
poor (you will use the source, luke) and I got the feeling that this one is
more like a side-project to the funambol community (since their whole
software-stack is written in that coffee language). The nice thing it has is
a working http transport based on libcurl (which is a 3rdparty dependency for
now but next version of Qtopia will have it anyway) and it has a quite
elaborate API (as long as you are ready to discover this through reading
lot's of code lines :-).

I plan to release my software soon, there is some polishing necessary at the
moment and some license clarification, I'll keep you informed if you wish.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions or remarks.
--
Sascha

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[Daniel Gollub]

On Thursday 24 April 2008 09:44:31 Sascha Peilicke wrote:
> First of all I wouldn't recommend using libsyncml from the opensync
> project, it's a rock-solid (and to my knowledge) very favorable library but
> it's hard to get that thing on the greenphone because of it's dependencies.
> Glibc and libxml have a footprint around 2.5MB (correct me, but i tested
> it) without your app. That's certainly too much for every embedded device,
> the factor that it's written in C brings some difficulties with it too,
> since all the Qt/Qtopia stuff is C++. You have two other free library
> options then:

glibc or glib?

IIRC, there are projects like BlueZ which have also glib dependency, they ship
optional something called "eglib" which is a small subset of glib which they
use. We actually could also strip down our use of glib or also use
this "eglib". Don't you use use BlueZ on Qtopia?

libxml - that's might be true. Maybe it's worth to look at libexpat to make
libsyncml (and OpenSync) more attractive for embedded devices. wbxml2 already
has a dependency on libexpat, and wbxml is quite nice if it comes to
Bluetooth or IrDA ;)

best regards,
Daniel

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[Daniel Gollub]

On Thursday 24 April 2008 09:44:31 Sascha Peilicke wrote:
> he factor
> that it's written in C brings some difficulties with it too, since all the
> Qt/Qtopia stuff is C++. You have two other free library options then:

(Overseen this one...)

What kind of difficulties do you see here with writting C++ code on top of a C
library? The KDE-PIM guys did with KitchenSync a really great job and wrapped
nearly entirely libopensync in C++ and made it even Qt'ish - the result is
libqopensync which is used by KitchenSync.

We could do the same for libsyncml -> libqsyncml ;)

Let me know if there is interested in a libqsyncml. I could prepare a fast
prototype if there is interested, maybe we could team here up with Michael's
effort and clean up the libsyncml API.

Anything else which makes libsyncml and/or OpenSync unattractive for embedded
devices and/or Qtopia?

best regards,
Daniel

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