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.
Will Stephenson presenting the Akonadi PIM integration system at Gran Canaria.
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.
News
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs Transitions to Linux
Another major organization has decided to kick Microsoft Windows and Office to the curb in favor of Linux.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
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