[Kolab-devel] [Kde-pim] Putting Akonadi on the Server?

[Thomas Koch]

Georg C. F. Greve:
> In the scope of our Kolab 3.0 considerations [1] we're also thinking about
> putting Akonadi on the server.
I'm sorry, but I believe this is a bad idea for several reasons:

* As you write, dbus and akonadi are designed and developed for the Desktop. 
Trying to make it work on the server has the potential of conflicts in 
interests between those optimizing for the Desktop (or even mobile) and kolab.

* Akonadi is designed with relational backends in mind. PIM data does not fit 
in relational data stores well and all Groupware systems using those have to 
make some kind of tradeof. (Sparse tables, Entity-Attribute-Value pattern, 
join-hell or structured data in cells)

* Kolab already is a complexity beast with so many different systems and 
historical cruft. Please don't add additional systems.

The wiki page does not indicate the problem that you try to solve with 
Akonadi. I assume the PHP frontend is not fast enough since PHP does not cache 
state between requests. But will things get faster if you need to talk to 
Akonadi which in turn talks to an SQL backend with all the data 
transformations in between and joins in SQLite?
I just read that SQLite was abandoned for Akonadi since it did not support 
multiple threads. What, if the user opens a couple of browser tabs?

In general I think that PHP is not the right tool for many reasons and that 
there are many possibilites to do caching in the JVM between requests. But 
that does not help you right now. What about IMAPProxy? 

It would help, if you could describe the original problem.

Regards,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro