I'm architecting a personal information manager middlewire for a commercial product. The PIM includes e-mail (from server , mobile devices), sms/mms, contacts, calendar, phonebook, call history, notes, task, reminder. It should supports e-mail sync/download from e-mail server and bluetooth enabled device as well. This is same for other PIM data. I'm looking for the componets or group of components for PIM available that will be used in linux environments. These components should cover miximum of the PIM items and functionalities and should if extendable.

Can anyone suggest me what are the best open source components availble that can be used for this product? Thanks in advance.

Is KDE PIM in stable form? Does all the functionalities supoorted by KDE PIM or at least can be extendable?

Regards,
Hossain

hossainreja wrote:I'm architecting a personal information manager middlewire for a commercial product. The PIM includes e-mail (from server , mobile devices), sms/mms, contacts, calendar, phonebook, call history, notes, task, reminder. It should supports e-mail sync/download from e-mail server and bluetooth enabled device as well. This is same for other PIM data. I'm looking for the componets or group of components for PIM available that will be used in linux environments. These components should cover miximum of the PIM items and functionalities and should if extendable.

The KDE PIM team is currently working on a similar architecture (actually for a couple of years now), called Akonadi: http://www.akonadi-project.org/

The architectures main component is a central cache which all applications communicate with using a local Unix socket (named pipe on Windows).

Data access is provided through helper processes called "agents". They map their folders (e.g. IMAP folders) and data items into a tree structure of collections.
End user application then access these collections through the cache.

This allows multiple applications to access the same data without having to get it again and again from the actual data source.
The amount of caching (e.g. just email headers) is controllable on a per collection level.

Local changes to data, e.g. change of read/unread status of emails, are also applied through the cache, which will notify all interested clients about the change so they can get the new data if they want to (e.g. update list of emails displayed).

If the actual data storage can not be reached, e.g. IMAP server not reachable because there is no network, any change will be remembered and replayed once the storage is accessible again (two way offline support).

The cache is data type agnostic, currently there are data source handlers for email (IMAP, POP3, local maildir, local mbox), calendar (local ical file, local ical dir, remote ical file, GroupDAV/CalDAV, Google Calendar), (calendar support includes tasks, notes and reminders), bookmarks, contacts (local vcard file, local vcard dir, remote vcard file, GroupDAV).

Some data handler agents support more than one type, e.g. for a groupware server. Currently supported groupware server is Kolab (www.kolab.org), prototypes for others are in the works (Exchange, Groupwise, etc.)

There is a KDE/Qt based client library which is part of KDE's platform. It contains the low level access code as well as visual components for things like displaying collections and their items in model/view fashion, data source agent managment, etc).

There are a couple of other, data type specific, libraries for more convenience when dealing with the respective data type, e.g. UI for display and edit of contacts, or parsing and creating of emails.

hossainreja wrote:Is KDE PIM in stable form? Does all the functionalities supoorted by KDE

KDE's PIM suite Kontact (http://www.kontact.org) is usually released twice a year as part of KDE's software compilation.
The current release of the KDE SC did not contain an update this time due to Kontact being switched to Akonadi for all its supported data types, email, calendar, contacts (support for news feeds will be switched later on).

It is also available in an "Enterprise" version through a couple of service companies.

If you have any further questions you might consider writing to the KDE PIM mailinglist https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim
It is read by most developers very regularily (the user forums are only read occasionally).

Cheers,
_