funambol / syncML progress?

[racmar]

Any progress on supporting a native linux solution to syncing /w WM5 devices? We have a few people /w Treo 700w devices, and they *really* want Over The Air sync to work. And I *really* don't want to use notify link.

I see Zimbra has this working already ( nudge, nudge )

[ts2136]

Anyone? Anyone?

I have been monitoring threads on the Funambol integration and would also like to know about the status. Thanks.

[rbardoel2]

I'm also very curious, can anyone tell us something about the current status?

[racmar]

Ok, I've waited over a month for a reliable reply here. My company is a paying scalix customer, and has a 100 user license count. Is there some way I can ask this question and actually get a response?

I understand you are busy fixing bugs and helping users, but this feature was advertised on the version 11 pages before it went GA. After that, all mention of syncML disappeared.

[tomster]

@racmar
Word! I do more than agree on that.
Waiting on a feature announced over 1/2 year ago is not what I'm argueing about. But getting literally NO response (other than "we're working on it") on any thread in this forum is way off line. I might be only a Community user so far, but leaving me with no clue when to expect such important feature let chances on sticking with Scalix decrease from week to week. Don't get me wrong. I truely appreciate the work done so far and developing is a never-ending trip but at some point I'd like to get a little feed-back on when to arrive at the next stop.
So c'mon fellas, drop us a line or two.

[aio]

News about Funambol-Scalix connector??
Thx
Erich

[racmar]

another MONTH, another bump...

[resol]

I would be very interested in it! I think there are many people out there who would also...
Could please someone tell us about current develpment state?
Hope you will provide that feature to all of your users, not only for paying ones.
For me, I am a student and I exclusively use Scalix for me on my own. There is no chance for me to pay normal amounts of monay for such things.
So I think Scalix is doing the right way in restricting the free edition with limited amount of users and not in funcionality!

Thanks a lot for great product! (the only thing which is really absolutely missing is a syncml connector!

resol.

[philjohn]

Maybe if we contacted some of the bods over at funambol they may be able to shed some light on it.

If it doesn't come soon I'm looking into the feasibility of creating my own with the scalix API's and open sourcing it to give back to the scalix community.

[ts2136]

Here is an email I sent to Scalix on 6/29/07. I have not seen a reply either in my inbox or here on the forum....

Hello,



I have been running the community edition of Scalix for about 18 months and have been anxiously awaiting information about an upcoming Funambol connector. There have been postings in the community forums that have not had a response from Scalix for months, which has become very discouraging.



My questions are:



- Is Scalix still working on a Funambol connector?

- If so, can you provide any sort of timeline?



- Why has Scalix not commented in the forum??? Simply do a search on Funambol and you will see that several people are monitoring this issue.



- I understand there are marketing issues involved with a Scalix-Funambol connector, and I would not be opposed to paying a licensing fee for this component as it is definitely a value-add.



I don’t know what you can say as far a response, but I can only assume the delays are either due to priorities of other projects, licensing issues with Funambol, or marketing issues with Notify or using the connector as a marketable product. What ever the case, there are people who would like to have some sort for update.



Thank you very much for taking the time to read this email and for making the Scalix community edition available with 25 premium users.

[philjohn]

I've bitten the bullet and started writing my own scalix SyncSource. It's a lot to get my head around architecture-wise, but I've had a look at the Zimbra one which is nicely written and has lots of good comments.

The documentation for funambol (development at least) is really lacking though, so I'll look at doing some docs up side-by-side.

I'm leaning towards licensing the thing as GPL so that anyone else can join and hack away. I'll post more when I've got something to show (for now I've just got a shell of the API access bit done, still wondering whether to use the API or direct IMAP access with JavaMail to retrieve data at the moment).

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Update:

I've now taken the Domino Connector and used it as a rough base for the Scalix one (it does caching in a DB to detect deleted/updated items).

I've also written a library that accesses (read only at the moment) the Calendar IMAP folder to get appointments. JavaMail really makes that part insanely easy.

Couldn't find API documentation for Funambol DS 6 anywhere, so ended up running JavaDoc on the source distribution, if anyone wants a zipped archive of it drop me a line.

I should be doing a basic read-only sync some time tomorrow at current rates of progress.

[joako]

I'd be glad to beta test for you I have a WM5 Smartphone.

Have you thought of just using IMAP for everything? All the data is already there via IMAP.....

[philjohn]

That's how I'm accessing all of the Scalix info (via IMAP)

I chose that instead of using the API as the API offered no filtering capabilities (save for downloading an XML descriptor, parsing it and searching). I also suspect that the API simply connects to the IMAP server, so using it would add another layer and degrade performance. With the JavaMail API I can run a search on the folder to get messages by key or between two timestamps (required for a funambol connector).

It makes adding items a little trickier as I have to make sure I set all of the scalix specific headers in the message, but it's not insurmountable. Worst case scenario I use IMAP for reading and API for writing, but I'd rather not rely on two different subsystems for reliability reasons.

At the moment I've got the connector compiling and running, but the CachedSyncSource is failing to connect to the funambol database for some reason, I'm trying to find out why now.

The more I look at what I've got, the more I'm thinking of starting from scratch as using the Domino connector as my base has added a lot of baggage that is just complicating things. With programming I prefer "KISS". So I'm going to start with a very basic connector that simply gives a list of SyncItems and then move on to deleted and adding items.

As soon as I've got something that works, and doesn't destroy data on our live Scalix install (using a specially created sacrificial account!) I'll post it on our corp website to download.

As it links against Funambol libraries it will be licensed under the HPL (Hones Public License).

[philjohn]

Huzzah! Good news everybody.

I now have server->phone sync working. After ditching my domino based sync and starting from scratch (keeping only my scalix data access layer) I got it running in about 30 minutes.

Thats the easy part, but progress is being made and we should have an alpha to play with this week (touch wood).

[tomster]

Sounds like.. let's say GREAT NEWS!

I couldn't help getting the impression that someone (philjohn) could just set up some sort of connector (and may it be only as proof of concept) in a couple of days, if he only really wants it (and of course is some kinda brainy mug)...

The folks at Scalix might have other issues to sort out, but announcing the connector some 10+ months ago and not even replying once on any thread (or PM) since is not increasing my faith. Besides the fact that NotifyLink can't possibly be a serious alternative. OK, Funambol is still lacking Symbian support yet, but I assume it being integrated way earlier than in NotifyLink.

All eyes on philjohn! I can't wait to hear about his progress (though not being able to commit a single code line). Keep it up!

TOM