Re: [NTLK] Shout out to developers

From: Steven Frank <stevenf_at_panic.com>
Date: Sun Sep 03 2006 - 14:44:05 EDT

On Sep 3, 2006, at 10:57 AM, Eckhart Köppen wrote:

> If you look at a recent Nokia S60 phone, SyncML is all they do -
> nothing proprietary, just standard stuff.

I know virtually nothing about SyncML, but was under the impression
that it was mainly for contacts and calendars. Is it extensible to
arbitrary things like notes and (daydreaming here) QuickFigure
spreadsheets?

Ivan: A cross-platform libnewt shared by platform-specific apps is a
good compromise. Paul was so far along with the DCL, but visiting
his site now, it seems to be gone completely. He is probably
planning something with Einstein that renders this whole conversation
moot anyway.

Jon: I posted a pretty lengthy dissection of some of NewtSync's
problem areas a few months back. There are issues with both specific
plug ins, and with the core syncing process itself. I did not feel
qualified to take it on. As I said earlier, syncing, specifically
conflict resolution, is really hard to get right.

On the surface it seems like all you have to do is compare
modification dates and push one record or the other, but it gets
significantly more complex than that, one example being the records
not having exactly the same fields and capabilities on the two
platforms (like repeating events), requiring translation between the
two formats.

Another example is propagating deletion of records. The way NewtSync
is written now, I believe you'd have to walk every record to find if
one had been deleted on the Newton side, a.k.a "slow sync". I don't
know what Apple's utilities did, but they probably had some other
trick to speed up the process.

If you've ever synced any device to any other device, you've surely
run into data corruption and duplicated records, etc. Even the best
minds in the business who do this full time for a living have trouble
getting it exactly right.

That's the nice thing about Sync Services / iSync. It handles most
of that nastiness for you. But, it's not cross-platform.

Not trying to be overly pessimistic here, but there's a reason this
project has such a checkered history.

Steven
http://panic.com/
http://stevenf.com/

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Received on Sun Sep 3 16:56:48 2006

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