August 21, 2009

Update....

Thanks to Brad Hards' quick intervention, I have a tarball of a recent SVN snapshot for OpenChange. I'll build the code and start working on reviewing the API tomorrow.

Stuck....

This is a special request:

The last couple days, the OpenChange project's website has fallen off the 'Net. As one of the steps in getting my development environment up is installing libmapi++ (which no distribution seems to have packaged at all), I'm stuck. If anyone knows the folks maintaining the OpenChange project's website, please find out what is going on. Also, if anyone has a current check-out of the libmapi++ tree, please let me know so I can get it from you. Thanks.

You may now return to your regular blogging enjoyment.

August 20, 2009

Trudging Through Another Build....

After spending an evening getting my development environment updated to trunk, I think I've come to a few conclusions: 1) I need to learn more about CMake, 2) learn how to deal with missing headers better (thank you ervin) 3. don't resort to sledgehammer methodology as quickly to fix a problem, 4) work on my my patience level more.

After committing the fix from being the guinea pig for the fix, I'm onto building kdepim, and then I'll start working on getting the code fixed for the openchange resource so it compiles.

August 18, 2009

Answering Questions.

Just so those that are curious know, I'll repost my response to the over a dozen comments to my posting last night......


Just a small fyi for those that have been commenting:

Yes, my aim is for 100% parity with Outlook's capabilities with MAPI. This means that Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Notes, Journal, Public Folders, Tasks, and Projects are on my TODO list.

Whether this will use openchange for all of that functionality has yet to be decided based off of testig and feature completion.

Also, I think I should make it clear: the code I'll be working on was started in development around 2007 by Brad Hards and continued by Alan Alvares for his 2008 GSoC project. This WILL be an akonadi resource that talks Extended MAPI/RPC to the Exchange server and DBUS back to the Akonadi session daemon. Where necessary, I might call things in the various libraries from the Samba4 project to mimic an Active Directory backed Exchange client to make my work easier, we'll see if I have to do that or if I can rely on some things from LDAP..... Onwards and Upwards :)


With this, I need to stress that it won't be instant progress on this, so please all, be patient :)

August 17, 2009

Hello planetkde!

This is my first posting on the planet (I hope... the aggregator doesn't seem to be showing my feed.... Here goes crossing fingers....)

Some people in the community may know me as the guy that likes Perl, Qt, KDE, and does a hell of a lot of IT administration at a very un-KDE job. I've helped out at a few F/OSS related events around the San Francisco Bay Area, including hosting lodging for three of the people that helped at the O'Reilly OSCON event earlier this month.

A large portion of the stuff you'll read about from my feed will be related to my (mis) adventures with getting KDE integrated with Exchange 2003 and later. I'll get into that a little more in the next post.

KDE, PIM, and MAPI

Enough acronyms for you? I thought so.... For those that might not have heard, I'll be taking on the challenge of getting KDE PIM fully Exchange capable. This comes from my desire to kill Outlook and Entourage from my life and not force me to use a tool not integrated very well into my desktop of choice (Evolution).

So what is MAPI, you might ask? Well, MAPI stands for Messaging Application Programming Interface, which is the tier one option if you want a mail client to talk to Microsoft's Exchange server. This interface has gone through a number of changes over the years and thus far has been an elusive target for F/OSS projects. Lately a project called Openchange has been working on a library that much of my work on kdepim will be focused around integrating into KDE. This library covers all of the mess of having to write our own library to get access to these servers. As some know, this library is already used in a native MAPI method in Evolution that was released recently in the routine releases of GNOME. I'll just leverage that work and make KDE just as accessible to Enterprise users stuck in an MS powered shop.

I'll try to cover all the things I do to make this a reality, so stay tuned, Fun stuff ahead :)

August 2, 2009

APP-Get Progress

I've gotten the code for the SourceManager mostly done, need a dumper function at this point and then I can utilise it in app-update. After that LWP code will be high on my list as I add the DownloadManager functions.