News

14/03/2005

Major updates to the konnector:

• No more hang at the end of synchronization. The client is cleanly disconnected.
• Multiple packet synchronization data is supported (very useful if you have an addressbook of more than 200 kB).
• You can now backup your calendar data! Full calendar synchronization will come soon.

13/03/2005

One more breakeage of kdepim (another abstract function to override). Fixed. Please install the new release.

22/02/2005

KSyncML compiles with the latest KDEPIM now. Sorry for troubles.

12/12/2004

As promised: deleting of the data (only on the remote side) works now.

11/12/2004

I have uploaded the new version of the konnector. It starts to be usable: it works quite nicely with the contact database of a P900. You can modify and add contacts on both sides and it works! Deleting is not implemented yet, but it won't be too complicated.
Please, use the multisynk frontend when testing the konnector (and reporting the bugs). I have encountered many problems with kitchensync that simply went away when multisynk entered the scene.

28/10/2004

A big update: KSyncML works now with CVS HEAD of KDEPIM. The code has been cleaned up and debugged a little bit. The code is tested with a P900 and it does not crash the phone ;+).
Unfortunately, there are some problems with "Map" handling, so the upload of contacts to the device has been disabled. I am still working on it, though.

15/08/2004

A very first ultra alpha is available. It only synchronizes the addressbook data, and it tries to do it reasonably well: it forces the full upload of data, and it handles more or less correctly all cases. The "Map" command handling is also implemented, so you shouldn't get any duplicates during the subsequent syncs. The local database is stored in ~/.kitchensync/KSyncML/...

What is it?

The KSyncML is a SyncML Konnector for Kitchensync.

The SyncML is a protocol invented by Nokia, Ericsson and others in order to provide a standard platform for synchronizing various data between various devices. Theoreticaly it is possible to synchronize anything using SyncML. The current devices however, use it mainly for all kind of PIM (Personal Information Management) data: calendars, contacts and so on....

Kitchensync is the synchronization program and framework for the KDE PIM suite. The current stable version is 0.0.6, but there is a lot of things going in the KDE CVS tree and we target this version for KSyncML development.
A "konnector" is a plugin for KitchenSync allowing it to connect to a specific device.

KSyncML is heavily based on an old, abandoned open-source project LibSyncML. LibSyncML was based on CommonC++ library and the STL. As of today, there is no more dependency to CommonC++, and the source is going to be gradually (very gradually) migrated from STL to a pure Qt/KDE code.

The main changes in respect to LibSyncML (just in case you care) are:

• KSyncML implements SyncML-over-HTTP.
• KSyncML implements 1.0 and 1.1 version of the SyncML protocol.
• KSyncML is mono-threaded and based on the Qt library networking.
• Some file names and class names have been changed.

What does it provide?

• It compiles cleanly and installs as a "konnector" resource.
• It listens to HTTP/1.1 incomming connections on port 8080.
• It accepts connections from both 1.0 and 1.1 syncml clients.
• It speaks unicode
• It forces the remote side to upload the whole addressbook.
• It responds with the status of synchronization.
• In case of new contacts, it uses 4 bytes temporary GUIDs and handles the client Mapping

What will it provide?

In my opinion the roadmap is to make an HTTP server that implements the complete slow sync implementation for contacts and organizer databases as soon as possible. Then, we can concentrate on other (also important) features. This is mainly because at least at first, the main users of SyncML in KDE would be the owners of phone-organizers (P900, N9210) connected locally (which means we don't care about bandwith and we don't care about security).

Please treat this as a TODO list in more or less descending order of priorities.

• Use multiple datastores (it's almost here).
• Implement a datastore for calendar/todo.
• Make the options (server port, database names...) configurable.
• Implement a basic and md5 authentication mechanism.
• Implement the http client to connect to remote servers
• Do anything missing to the full SyncML compliance.
• Make https work.
• Confirm that wbxml works.
• Implement the SyncML-over-OBEX and the pure SyncML-over-TCP.
• Fight memory leaks. Debug. Make the code somehow kde standards compliant.
• Throw out any dependencies on STL (hopefully they will go away in the meanwhile ;).

Howto

I hope this will make a way into the official KDEPIM CVS, but in the meanwhile, take the sources from here. Unpack the tarball to kdepim/kitchensync/libkonnector2/plugins/. Change the Makefile.am file in kdepim/kitchensync/libkonnector2/plugins/ to add "syncml" at the end of the line "SUBDIRS". Reconfigure, recompile.Make a backup of your data! Enjoy.

The Konnector is pretty verbose, so you can more or less easily guess what's going on. There is also a #define DUMP_SESSION_DATA in mlhttpserver.cpp, if defined (by default), all XML data going from the client to the session object and vice-versa will be logged to a file "ksyncml.log" in the current directory. Absolutely needed when reporting problems.

Please report any problems to the Kde-pim mailing list, or directly to me.
Maciek Borowka

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