Hacking Akonadi

January 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment

Personal information management (PIM) is the name of a category of software which provides access to a calendar, address book, e-mail, or note-taking service.  Made popular largely by the Palm pilot, PIM allows users to organize their schedules and communicate more effectively with each other.

Akonadi is a proxy framework for PIM systems on the KDE desktop.  A proxy framework connects different storage backends to PIM application frontends.  This means that any Akonadi-enabled calendar program can access events stored on a smartphone, or in a file on the hard drive, or in the cloud (say on Google Calendar) without writing the same code twice.  Similarly, to provide a new means of storing PIM information, a developer can simply write an Akonadi back-end and all the existing PIM applications will be able to use it to store events.

I recently created some software that integrates Akonadi calendar events into KDE’s office suite.  This allows a user to create a document and attach it to a calendar event by clicking a “publish” button in the word processor and then filling out some information about the event (such as the start and end dates).  The software has some missing features — it only enables the creation of new events, not the modification of existing ones.

I will be working with a student to address some of these drawbacks this semester.  I will try to post updates on our progress here on this blog.


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