Meeting place for people working on the native OGo Evolution connector.

Status

Update (2005-05-22): The Noodle connector got forked in the Subversion tree. The goal is to make it more independend of OGo, that is, to implement a generic GroupDAV plugin.
Besides the fork a lot of work happend in ZideStore to improve compatibility: task support for GroupDAV etag's is very much improved and recent revisions support vCard PUTs (creating / writing vCards into ZideStore).

Update (2004-12-23): LambdaUX and Imendio announced the first beta version of the OpenGroupware.org / GroupDAV connector for Evolution. The connector is not yet feature complete but gives people a chance to have a try and help testing the connector.
[Announce], [Tutorial], [Report], [Source]

Update (2004-11-30): The Noodle project. will lead to a completely functional Evolution 2.2 / OpenGroupware.org 1.0 connector. Alvaro del Castillo posted a roadmap as well as a Noodle OGo install guide.
The connector is going to use the GroupDAV protocol to connect to OGo ZideStore.

Update (2004-11-03): Some work has been done on a Perl script which connects Evolution 2.0 using the Exchange connector and ZideStore. Please check the OGo / Evolution list archives on details.

Update (2004-05-20): There were lots of discussions going on in the evo-ogo mailling list the last days. No other topic raised the number that high high. The question was: What to do with the Ximian Connector for Exchange?
Anyway (*g*) 0.0.2 of evo15-ogo was released. Grab it from: http://dentrassi.de/evo-ogo/. or from OGO CVS.
Also we want to try a evo-ogo blog ( http://quasispace.de/blogs/evo-ogo.php). Maybe you like it!

Update (2004-05-14): Novell Ximian recently released the Exchange Connector for Evolution 1.4 under the GPL license and is going to bundle the Exchange Connector as free software with Evolution 2.0.
This is great news as it gives us a much better basis given that at least the 1.2 connector worked quite fine in combination with ZideStore. It is currently discussed whether the connector should be forked to provide better Evolution integration or whether we should extended the upstream Exchange connector to support OGo as well.

Update (2004-05-09): We have a (very basic) Evolution 1.5 Connector for OpenGroupware (0.0.1). Currently it can only read out address book entries but hopefully we get some more functions soon ;-)
Anyway, it is a start for the coming Evolution 1.5 (2.0) and (btw) features proxy support!
It can be downloaded (for now, until I find some time to commit everything to the OGO cvs) from http://dentrassi.de/evo-ogo/.
Thanks to Stephane it is also available for debian via apt-get. Read this for more information.

Update (2004-03-14): Stephane Delcroix and Filip van Raemdonck did some improvements to the current connector sources, including fixes to some bugs and added configuration of ZideStore parameters using gconf.

Update (2004-01-20): The project development has stalled in the moment. General wisdom: do not attempt to compile the connector on SuSE Linux with XD2 - either use Debian, RedHat or at least SuSE with the default GNOME installation, everything else will give you "issues" ...
Rodrigo Moya also suggested that it might make sense to switch to the Evo 1.5 development tree which uses a slightly different API.

Update (2003-10-13): Apparently Alvaro (Evo client) and Martin (ZideStore additions) got forward very well in the last weeks. It seems to be possible to access calendar and contacts folders of ZideStore at least in a read-only way.
The plugin code will be uploaded to the "evolution" CVS module in the OGo CVS in the next days. And it now does use the SOUP WebDAV library which apparently is going to get cleaned up by Ximian.

Update: Alvaro del Castillo started to work on the prototype of Anders. We'll hope to add it to the CVS soon. The first approach will use the Neon library and access ZideStore using WebDAV.

Update: Ximian has released the sourcecode of the Groupwise Connector for Evolution under GPL. The sources are checked into the "evolution" CVS module in the OGo CVS. The connector uses SOUP as the HTTP client library and contains an implementation of an Evolution store provider and of a Calendar provider.

The plugin is in the design phase. Anders Carlsson has written some very basic demo on how to write an Evolution backend which is currently in the hands of Helge Heß for cleanup and documentation.
Now the plugin can read contact lists and also calendar events. The development is going well and in the next months it is possible that we will have a first connector.
Please see the mailing list discussion on progress.

There is some general agreement in the mailing list that we do not want to write a full Ximian Connector replacement which also allows connecting to Exchange servers. We rather try to find a suitable and documented protocol and avoid proprietary MAPI properties.
Update (2003-10-13): The current approach is to use WebDAV to query the folder structure of ZideStore and then continue with "iCalendar" and "vCard" over HTTP. Some additions (special URLs) are implemented for bulk queries of entities using GET.

Apparently the Wombat IDLs use plain iCalendar and vCard strings for communication between backend and frontend, so we might just use very basic HTTP for retrieval of vCard and iCalendar entities.
ZideStore already supports retrieving very basic vCards representations of the OGo contacts, but certainly needs to be extended a lot into fully supporting vCard-over-HTTP.

Ettore and Dan suggested not to use libsoup, since it seems to be buggy in various respects. Ettore instead suggested using libcurl, which may also be used in the next version of Ximian Connector.
Update (2003-10-13): Actually Alvaro decided to use libsoup. Apparently Ximian is going to fix the SOUP issues and libsoup has some advantages because of its tight glib integration.

Ximian hackers have started to solve the problems in libsoup so for the moment, the connector will use libsoup because it's nice integration with glib.

Besides that there is also libneon which is used successfully in the ZideLook Outlook provider and in the Subversion project, so that might be a good option.
Just found another possible option, FireRPC, which is a very lightweight XML-RPC library that nevertheless provides most interesting features like SSL and HTTP keep-alive.

The biggest problem is that we need a library which can be hooked into glib for asynchronous processing - otherwise we would need to go back to threads, which would be "suboptimal" for various reasons ;-)

Yet another option would be to use the OGo Objective-C libraries for HTTP and WebDAV which should integrate pretty well with glib and provide everything required. On the other side, being pure C has several advantages ...

evolution@opengroupware.org