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
-
Photoshop on Linux?
A developer has patched Wine so that it'll run specific versions of Photoshop that depend on Adobe Creative Cloud.
-
Linux Mint 22.3 Now Available with New Tools
Linux Mint 22.3 has been released with a pair of new tools for system admins and some pretty cool new features.
-
New Linux Malware Targets Cloud-Based Linux Installations
VoidLink, a new Linux malware, should be of real concern because of its stealth and customization.
-
Say Goodbye to Middle-Mouse Paste
Both Gnome and Firefox have proposed getting rid of a long-time favorite Linux feature.
-
Manjaro 26.0 Primary Desktop Environments Default to Wayland
If you want to stick with X.Org, you'll be limited to the desktop environments you can choose.
-
Mozilla Plans to AI-ify Firefox
With a new CEO in control, Mozilla is doubling down on a strategy of trust, all the while leaning into AI.
-
Gnome Says No to AI-Generated Extensions
If you're a developer wanting to create a new Gnome extension, you'd best set aside that AI code generator, because the extension team will have none of that.
-
Parrot OS Switches to KDE Plasma Desktop
Yet another distro is making the move to the KDE Plasma desktop.
-
TUXEDO Announces Gemini 17
TUXEDO Computers has released the fourth generation of its Gemini laptop with plenty of updates.
-
Two New Distros Adopt Enlightenment
MX Moksha and AV Linux 25 join ranks with Bodhi Linux and embrace the Enlightenment desktop.
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