Mozilla Email & Calendar PDA Synchronization?

jark writes "Outlook is, for the most part, the industry standard for contact management, personal information management and email use in the corporate workplace. We are looking in to deploying Mozilla across our network, included with the Calendar project, but have one last necessary hurdle: PalmOS synchronization. Are there currently any applications that will sync Mozilla mail, address books and calendar events with PalmOS based handhelds? If not, are there any plans in the works for this to become a reality?"

Comments

Scripting APIs?

[RevAaron]

Whenever I see this, it just makes me wish that most Unix apps- whether they were written against GTK+, Qt, KDE, Xlib, GTK+GNOME, Qt+KDE, XForms, FLTK, Prima, Motif, whatever- has some sort of AppleScript-like API. I know that KDE has DCOP, but that's for KDE apps, not all Qt apps. GNOME has CORBA, but again, only for GNOME apps, not all GTK+ apps.

Hell, they don't even have to be standard across toolkits. I'd be extra happy if they all just responded to XML-RPC.

Now, if we had something like Apple's OSA (Open Script Architecture, what AppleScript ties in to) in these GUI toolkits, we could write a perl script to act like a "hotsync conduit" on Windoze/Mac OS with the Palm desktop.

Except, it wouldn't have to be a thousand line pain in the ass C++ app. It'd just a 10 line perl script, looking something like:

use ZaurusSync;
use MozillaOSA;

$pda = ZaurusSync->new();
$pda->openOn("/dev/ttyS1");
$ pdaCal = $pda->application("Qtopia:Addressbook");
$cal = MozillaOSA->new()->application("Mozilla:Addr essbook");

foreach $name ( $cal->personKeys ) {
#getPerson returns undef if she doesn't exist
if ($pdaCal->getPerson($person) eq $person->asZaurusPerson) {#perhaps further checking
} else {
$pdaCal->newPerson( $person->asZaurusPerson);
}
}
$pda->close();

Now, this is hypothetical perl, it won't work, and the parts that normally would are probably malformed.

But this sort of thing is *so* far from impossible. It just has to be figured in from the start of a toolkit or even an app, which could implement it's own.

If Mac OS can do it, why can't we Unix peeps?

Native Mozilla Address Book - Palm Sync

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there currently any applications that will sync Mozilla mail, address books and calendar events with PalmOS based handhelds? If not, are there any plans in the works for this to become a reality?

I found some stuff in the Mozilla Status Updates that may interest you:

• May 31st MailNews Update
• • Started looking into the requirements for Palm Pilot sync
  • ...
  • Started investigating the requirements for implementing an Mozilla-Palm Address Book synchronization module.
  • looked into the details of Address Book APIs in MAPI for IPC interaction with Mozilla Address Book.
  • looked into the requirements for implementing HotSync process of Palm used to synchronize data between a Palm application and the corresponding desktop application.
  • looked into the Netscape 4x implementation of Communicator AB Palm synchronization
• Started writing the analysis and requirements document for Mozilla/Netscape Address Book HotSync.

June 14th MailNews Update

• Looked into the details of Palm Conduit Framework
• Looked into the details of the 4x conduit code
• Continued working on the Palm-Mozilla AB sync detail design
• Started working on a simple prototype with a basic conduit and a call into Mozilla AB to open an AB Mork DB in the Mozilla process space from the conduit in the Palm HotSync Manager process space.

The comments in the reports were written by Netscape employees. It looks like Palm sync functionality is in the early planning stages, so Netscape probably want it for Buffy, the codename for their next release after 7.0 (7.0 is codenamed MachV). Basically, it looks like it's in development but it probably won't be available in Mozilla for some time.