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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?"

1 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Scripting APIs? by RevAaron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad