[Kolab-devel] Kolab on Gmail

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Hi!

In the recent weeks the Kolab specific code in Horde has been
significantly restructured to make it more developer-friendly. This
cleanup also made it easy to add a small hack that allows you to run
the code on a standard IMAP server that provides no support for IMAP
folder annotations.

The Kolab concept is based on this annotation support but so far the
feature is only being provided by the Cyrus IMAP server. In addition
the Kolab Server uses some patches in that area which means that you
always need a full Kolab Server as a basis for Kolab specific
development.

For Horde this means that the other developers have no chance to test
the Kolab specific code sections even if they sometimes need to touch
these areas. But installing a Kolab server is too much of a hurdle.

So I always wanted to allow running the Kolab code on a plain IMAP
server. And ever since Gmail started providing IMAP access I
considered that Kolab on Gmail would be a nice toy thing.

So today the code that allows this went into Horde CVS. It is far from
finished but it is sufficient to provide you with a demo installation:

 http://hordeongmail.pardus.de

(it might still take a while until DNS propagates. Until then you'll
be redirected to my home page)

You can use standard Gmail credentials there. But please be aware that
I could grab these credentials! So you should only use a dummy account
in your own best interest.

You'll certainly find many bugs or things that are not working yet but
it is of course just a demonstration.

In fact this line of coding is something I won't invest too much time
into. It will never get any support from Kolab (as using annotations
is the better solution) and I don't guarantee you that the format I'm
using stays the same. So if you'd start using the code in a production
environment the next upgrade might prevent access to the old data.

The main intention of this is to ease access to the code and allow
more people to play with it.

The way things work at the moment is a special Kolab XML format for
storing annotations. Each folder gets a single message in this format
that carries the UID "1". This message holds all annotation values
you'd usually store as folder metadata.

If you want to configure a Horde CVS installation specifically for
Gmail you will still need to patch some IMAP parts like this:

  http://hg.pardus.de/cgi-bin/hg.cgi/horde/HORDE/file/tip/framework/HK-GW-Gmail.patch

For other IMAP servers this might not be necessary.

Enjoy playing!

Cheers,

Gunnar

-- 
______ http://kdab.com _______________ http://kolab-konsortium.com _

p at rdus Kolab work is funded in part by KDAB and the Kolab Konsortium

____ http://www.pardus.de _________________ http://gunnarwrobel.de _
E-mail : p at rdus.de                                 Dr. Gunnar Wrobel
Tel.   : +49 700 6245 0000                          Bundesstrasse 29
Fax    : +49 721 1513 52322                          D-20146 Hamburg
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