Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: Akonadi for the Integrated Desktop
The Cross-Desktop Metadata track at this year's Gran Canaria Summit highlighted developer activity targeting central storage of contact data, email and other personal information.
Will Stephenson, responsible for Personal Information Management (PIM) software at Novell, introduced Akonadi, a service that centrally stores contacts, emails, IM entries and much more. Akonadi should replace the individual data storage of various applications, which were designed over the last 10 years to accommodate small, local data volumes, said Stephenson. Akonadi should provide one service with a unified API that scales well and is extensible to new data types as they emerge.
The large KMail and KOrganizer applications are currently undergoing refactoring to make them Akonadi-compliant. The Akregator RSS reader, the KPilot handheld tool and the KNode news reader are also in the works, reported Stephenson. KAddressBook will be reimplemented as codename KContactManager. At the conference, Stephenson invited developers to submit new interfaces for Akonadi.
To demonstrate just such an interface, Austrian KDE developer Kevin Krammer followed up in the next half-hour session by programming, partly with help from the audience, a simple Akonadi resource for read-only access.
Comments
comments powered by DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
![Learn More](https://www.linux-magazine.com/var/linux_magazin/storage/images/media/linux-magazine-eng-us/images/misc/learn-more/834592-1-eng-US/Learn-More_medium.png)
News
-
NVIDIA Released Driver for Upcoming NVIDIA 560 GPU for Linux
Not only has NVIDIA released the driver for its upcoming CPU series, it's the first release that defaults to using open-source GPU kernel modules.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 24.07 Released
If you’re into rolling release Linux distributions, OpenMandriva ROME has a new snapshot with a new kernel.
-
Kernel 6.10 Available for General Usage
Linus Torvalds has released the 6.10 kernel and it includes significant performance increases for Intel Core hybrid systems and more.
-
TUXEDO Computers Releases InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen9 Laptop
Sporting either AMD or Intel CPUs, the TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 is an extremely compact, lightweight, sturdy powerhouse.
-
Google Extends Support for Linux Kernels Used for Android
Because the LTS Linux kernel releases are so important to Android, Google has decided to extend the support period beyond that offered by the kernel development team.
-
Linux Mint 22 Stable Delayed
If you're anxious about getting your hands on the stable release of Linux Mint 22, it looks as if you're going to have to wait a bit longer.
-
Nitrux 3.5.1 Available for Install
The latest version of the immutable, systemd-free distribution includes an updated kernel and NVIDIA driver.
-
Debian 12.6 Released with Plenty of Bug Fixes and Updates
The sixth update to Debian "Bookworm" is all about security mitigations and making adjustments for some "serious problems."
-
Canonical Offers 12-Year LTS for Open Source Docker Images
Canonical is expanding its LTS offering to reach beyond the DEB packages with a new distro-less Docker image.
-
Plasma Desktop 6.1 Released with Several Enhancements
If you're a fan of Plasma Desktop, you should be excited about this new point release.
Re: e-d-s
Both are services running in the user's session (as opposed to running once per machine) and provide a central point of access for data.
Akonadi has been designed to work with all kinds of data, i.e. not restricted to contacts and calendar, but also e-mail, RSS feeds, bookmarks, news groups, etc.
Another difference is that Akonadi's data providers or backends (called Akonadi resource agents or Resources) are running in separate processes, thus shielding the Akonadi service from failure on their parts. If one Resource crashes, none of the other Resources nor Akonadi nor any of the applications are affected.
It basically also opens the way for implementing resources in any programming language or using any library stack because they don't have to be loaded into Akonadi as some kind of compatible plugin.
e-d-s