Status of Akonadi before the Berlin meeting

Hi,

to get everyone up to speed again, I've created a list with Akonadi changes 
since the meeting in Osnabrück. I've also added a list of issues I would like 
to discuss, with those solved we should have all the functionality in Akonadi 
that was provided by the old KResources framework (and a lot more of course, 
but it would be the point were we could start using Akonadi in KDE PIM).


Changes since Osnabrück
=======================

Server
------

- basic cache management
- config file for database settings, additional support for MySQL   
(non-embedded)
- support arbitrary collection attributes
- no more DBus multithreading hacks :)

Resources
---------

- change recording and replay
- generic collection synchronizer
- vCard and NNTP resources

libakonadi
----------

- value-based collection API, collection are identified by id instead of by   
path now
- value-based item API (see below)
- Monitor now also fetches the changed object, simplifying application code

GSoC - Bruno Virlet is working on libakonadi model/view stuff:
- various model fixes, passing TT's modeltest
- proxy model to filter collections of a specific type


Open issues
===========

Type-specific client API
------------------------

How do we connect type-specifc libraries (libkabc, libkcal, etc) with Akonadi? 
The obvious choice would be inheriting from Akonadi::Item, but this would 
also require to re-implement every class returning an Item pointer. Also, 
there are ownership issues with a pointer-based API and Akonadi::Monitor. 
While a value-based API would be nice, it's still unknown how this could be 
done (templates?, Tobias had a design pattern in mind, I don't remember which 
one though).


Item data format
----------------

Related to above: how do we store PIM items, what format do we use to 
communicate with the backend?


Resource API
------------

The current resource API is getting quite complex, mainly due to asynchronous 
operations. We need to review the current API and look for simplifications.

Another issue is the the amount of "magic" going on in Akonadi::ResourceBase 
(change compression, collection syncing), which is not accessible for unit 
tests.


regards
Volker