Today, I’ve decided to put my Thunderbird + Unity integration project on hold while I focus on something a little more dire:
Integrating Thunderbird with the Casio Calculator Watch.
It’s a tough platform, but I’ve already made some progress. Check it out:
It's your mail! On your watch! In the 80s!
I’ll let you know when the add-on is available.
When I’m not hacking on Thunderbird, MarkUs, or Review Board, I usually spend my time playing in a band called The Johnson Report.
I normally don’t play the “band card”, but I’m particularly proud of this latest achievement, and wanted to share.
As I mentioned last time, I want to extend the Thunderbird address book to support Ubuntu One contacts synchronization.
But there’s a problem: currently, the address book relies on something called RDF, which prevents me from extending the address books outside of C++.
“So why not just write it in C++?”, I hear you cry!
The answer: because Thunderbird has been trying to shake RDF like a bad cold. A developer named Joey Minta officially declared war on RDF in March of 2008. The campaign to rid Thunderbird of RDF is almost complete.
So I’d hate to damage the war effort by adding more RDF code to Thunderbird.
The solution? I have to finish what Joey Minta started – at least for the address book. I have to replace all RDF-dependant code with something better – something extendable.
Then I can get down to work on the Ubuntu One sync.
So saddle up. We have to hunt this RDF bum down. For justice.
Remember my quest to integrate Ubuntu One contacts into Thunderbird?
So I spent a chunk of time over the last day or so looking at prior art – the efforts of others to solve the same problem. (I’m using “prior art” pretty loosely. I’m not by any means filing patent claims.)
Hedera is a Thunderbird extension, and probably the most direct solution to the Thunderbird and Ubuntu One integration problem. With Hedera, all contacts in all address books are sent off to Ubuntu One, with metadata to keep the contacts in the right address books. Metadata is also included to keep contacts distinct from one Thunderbird profile to the next (if you’re one of the rare users of profiles).
As of late, the extension has gotten a bit dusty – the author, James Tait, is currently working at Canonical, and hasn’t had much time to maintain it.
Despite that, it still does the job pretty well. I was successfully able to synchronize my contacts to Ubuntu One, which made me fist-pump. Great work, James!
However, after examining the code, I have a few concerns:
Funambol develops open-source mobile communications sync software, and it looks like Canonical is using Funambol to power their mobile sync services.
Users install the Funambol Mozilla Sync Client, which then syncs contacts with Ubuntu One over the mobile sync service.
It’s not a bad solution, and is the one advocated by the Ubuntu Support pages.
Here are my concerns:
Now, with respect to that last point, I’m not against paying for stuff. Money lets companies like Canonical, Funambol (and Mozilla Messaging, for that matter) survive. But I do think it’s a little silly that Thunderbird needs to pretend to be a mobile phone, and communicate through the mobile sync service. That’s why I said Hedera was the more direct solution.
If I got any of that wrong, I’m sure someone from Funambol will comment and correct me. 🙂
Bindwood is an extension that allows Mozilla Firefox to synchronize bookmarks via Ubuntu One. The reason I’m putting this up, is because a lot of good code has been written here to communicate with the DesktopCouch service. If I resolve a few licensing issues, it might be possible for me to leverage some of that code to make the Thunderbird + Ubuntu One project move faster.
Evolution currently has Ubuntu One support built in, thanks to the Evolution-CouchDB project.
Evolution-CouchDB creates a new address book called “Ubuntu One” for every user. Any contacts that go into that address book are sync’d with Ubuntu One, and any contacts that get added to Ubuntu One get loaded into that address book.
It’s an elegant solution, and addresses the issues I brought up with Hedera.
If I were to implement a similar solution for Thunderbird, it would mean that contacts between Evolution would be seamlessly imported into Thunderbird. The behaviour would be exactly the same. Consistency is good. Consistency means happy users.
Unless I hear compelling argument for something else, I think this the behaviour I’m going to implement.
Mac OSX has it’s own internal address book, and many Mac-based Thunderbird users were crying out for integration. A developer named Peter Van der Beken karate-kicked the bug (and may have collected a bug bounty on it…unsure), and now we have OSX address book integration.
The OSX address book integration is very similar to Evolution’s behaviour: it creates a new address book within Thunderbird, and all contacts from the OSX native address book appear there.
As it stands, this integration is read-only.
Since we’re dealing with OSX, it means Objective-C is the name of the game. Here’s the code.
Ugh. Wouldn’t it be awesome to leverage some of the work from Bindwood, Hedera (and maybe Funambol…I haven’t examined their code yet), and implement the Ubuntu One integration all in Javascript? Yes! That’d be lovely!
Except for one thing.
I spent most of yesterday examining this one, and I think I’ve got my head wrapped around it.
So, RDF stands for Resource Description Framework, and it’s a way of representing information in a way so that machines can make useful inferences and queries about that information. That’s a super-simplified definition. Here’s something a little more robust.
What does this have to do with Thunderbird and Ubuntu One?
Well, it turns out that the Thunderbird address book interface uses RDF to query / know about the address books that are available. So, when you pop open the address book manager in Thunderbird, and it populates the list of address books, it’s using RDF to get that information.
So what’s wrong with that? Well, it means that if I want to add a special “Ubuntu One” address book, it has to register itself with the RDF service as an RDFResource.
There’s two issues there:
So I might have to really start pushing on RDF removal from the address book. If I go that route, it means that Ubuntu One synchronization would not be available for anything earlier than Thunderbird 3.3. Ugh.
Sounds like it’s time for me to discuss this with my superiors. I’ll let you know what I find out.
I’ve been silent about my work for a few weeks, which is a shame, because one of the top reasons why I accepted a job with Mozilla Messaging was because I was free to talk about what I was doing.
I’ve been neglecting that right, but only because I’ve been holy shit busy. I’ve been blitzing my Ubuntu Unity integration work like a MoFo, and have gotten two Thunderbird extensions up on Mozilla Labs:
So what’s next?
Ubuntu One is a service that allows you to sync things like files, bookmarks and contacts between different computers. (Incidentally, Mozilla has their own service called Sync to do something similar with bookmarks and passwords.)
That’s a pretty cool idea. Imagine it – you get a brand new computer, hook it up to Ubuntu One, and blam: all of your bookmarks and contacts are already there waiting for you.
Currently, however, Thunderbird does not support sharing contacts via Ubuntu One.
And that’s what I’m tackling next.
At this point, my goal is to write an extension that will add a new address book to Thunderbird. Any contacts that are currently stored and shared via Ubuntu One will appear in that address book.
I’ll deal with adding new contacts later – for now, I’ll just do read-only, to keep the complexity down.
So stay tuned. Ubuntu One Contacts integration is coming…
