Desktop Storage Services

Problem

Today, all applications use their own storage services to store their data. The user fills one application of data and, when he changes to another application that uses the same type of data, the user does not have any data in there.

Use cases

Notes

• Tomboy, GNote, stickynotes, evolution(notes) are note taking apps. if the user takes notes in evolution, he does not have any notes present in tomboy, or vice-versa.

Music meta-data

• Rhythmbox, banshee and others store their searcheable meta-data somewhere. When you change music player, you loose all lists and gathered music.

Tasks

• Getting Things Gnome (GTG), GnomeDo, Tasque, Tasks, Evolution(task) are task managers. If users sets any tasks in GTG, when he opens evolution, it is presented with no data.

Calendar

• Sunbird, evolution and others are event managers that rely on time framed data. If a user stores a calendar data in Sunbird, it cannot access it in evolution.

NNTP

• Evolution, Pan and others if evolution stores news, then, if you want to open pan to read them, you have to download them again and you don't know witch ones you have read.

Contacts

• evolution, pidgin and others and other are contact managers and have stored people information. it would be nice if hat information is passed trough applications (actually it more or less is).

News feeds

• Evolution, liferea, Thunderbird and others are feed readers that store the feed data in their own storage. If you want to use liferea to read news and change to evolution, you loose all your data.

emails

• Evolution and Thunderbird are two email clients. If you have accounts and definitions in one client, you loose all when passing from one to other.

Proposal

If we centralize the storage data in the same place, it could be used between different apps. While email seems a bit more dificult to understand why should one change email client, the main example is, perhaps using evolution as base. Evolution stores contacts, tasks, email and calendar information. If you use evolution for email, tomboy for notes, GTG for tasks and sunbird for calendar, you would like to open evolution and have that information there. But you don't have it.

The proposal is to have something like an extended evolution-data-server (evolution here is just an historical reference). Here, we could add storage backends and information storage types and, when it is present, applications would use it. if not, they would use their own storage system. This is even better if you have events from that storage. For example, an email arrival, a new contact added to pidgin, or a new note in tomboy.

for more information read this thread from gnome-list http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2009-July/msg00017.html

Examples

• Evolution-Data-Server : Stores contacts and calendar data

• Mojito : Social data server: friends and conversations.