My Life Is A House

My daily life with all things Libre and Open

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Late at the party aka first report of Google Tasks support to libgdata/Evolution

This is reasonably but terribly late my first report on my project for this summer - this spring was my last in my dear uni and therefore my schedule got little bit screwed up. However now I'm back on track and crunching code as mid term review closes in.
This time I'm adding Google Tasks support to libgdata and also Evolution. As vivid Google Tasks user myself I always wanted to try my hand in this, and therefore jumped on first possibility to do it as my this years GSoC project. My mentors are superhackers Philip Withnall and Milan Crha of Evolution fame. I have used lot of their work each day (using Evolution and GMail integration for last two years, Evolution as email client for 8 years I think) and it is a little bit strange to delve into code which I have been dependent to for years. For those who don't know libgdata is that library which allows you to get all things from Google services using their API in GNOME desktop (altough libgdata is very platform neutral with small dependency set).  It is written using C and GObject, and currently uses libxml to parse XML responses from Google.
I started with understanding how Google Tasks API looks like and how it will fit in libgdata universe. Biggest change what comes with implementing it is response format change from XML to JSON. There's tons of JSON libaries for C available, however only one works well within GLib and GObject universe - JSON-GLib. By version number it feels not to be finished, however it is universally available installed by default in all major distributions. It also has what looks like complete documentation.
Main work for first two weeks was to figure out how to properly implement JSON support without breaking or changing current API much. I will have to define lot of new virtual functions for base classes, therefore ABI will be broken anyway. Google Tasks JSON API is very simple comparing to rest of newest API family, therefore adding general JSON support to libgdata I also have to check other APIs (for Calendar example), so they would fit in better when added later.
Currently I have started to read and hack Evolution - more concretely evolution-data-server - code so I can have at least visual demo for midterm review and my 4 minutes of fame in GUADEC :) I will do a little bit more detailed blog post about my changes in libgdata code base before submitting my mid term evaluation. My current work on libgdata can be found at my GitHub account https://github.com/Pecisk/libgdata

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