[Cosmo-dev] Sharing Format discussions..

[John Townsend]

On May 23, 2006, at 3:13 PM, Brian Moseley wrote:
>
> from the cosmo perspective - i'd like to look at the complete list of
> requirements from chandler, foxmarks, interop with
> ical/evolution/sunbird/lightning, and whatever else i've forgotten,
> and assign priorities. i don't want to fall into the trap of stopping
> on a dime and forgetting about earlier plans because of a flavorful
> new feature of the week :)
>

Agreed. We should invite some of the non-OSAF people like Todd to  
join us in this discussion. In fact, anyone who is reading this: if  
you know someone who should be involved in this discussion, please  
invite them to join us on the Cosmo list for discussion.


> btw - i think the non-osaf people on this list deserve to know what
> the hell we are talking about!
>

Ah, ok. So, for those that don't know, here's a brief summary (feel  
free to correct me if I get any of this wrong):

Up to this point, Chandler has utilized Cosmo as a sharing server.  
Chandler has the ability to share collections to Cosmo and current  
does that using WebDAV and CalDAV. When Chandler writes data to  
Cosmo, it writes out essentially the same set of data in two  
different formats: Cloud XML for Chandler use and CalDAV data for  
interoperability with other clients like Scooby or Sunbird.

Going forward, we would like to change that. Beside the obvious fact  
that sharing the same set of data is slow and inefficient, we  
eventually plan to deal with other media types when we do sharing.  
Some of those media types are known today, some are not. So, to  
summarize.. we want to develop a rich sharing format that can:

- Satisfy the needs of the projects within the Chandler ecosystem.
- Be more efficient than how we are doing it today
- The format should be extensible and scalable
- The format should utilize standards where possible.

Other points to consider are that even though we are sharing a newer  
richer format with Cosmo in this plan, we still would like to  
maintain interoperability as much as possible. This might mean that  
Cosmo has explicit knowledge of the sharing format, parses it, and  
creates standards-based data structures on the server (for example,  
Cosmo might take in the rich sharing format, store it for chandler,  
and then parse it to create a CalDAV collection for interop use).  
Again, these are just ideas and we haven't set anything in motion yet.

If you have thoughts on this, now is the time to speak up. Any and  
all thoughts are welcome!

--> John