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-
-The Evolution Project specification
-Miguel de Icaza.
-
-
-* Introduction
-
- Evolution is a project aiming at providing the free software
- community with a professional, high-quality tool for managing
- mail, appointments, tasks and other personal information
- tools.
-
- We want to make Evolution a system that addresses our needs
- (the free software development community) and we believe that
- by addressing our needs, we will provide a system that will
- scale in the years to come for other users that are just
- starting to use computers and the internet.
-
- The main objectives of Evolution are to provide these powerful
- features, and to make the user interface as pretty and
- polished as possible.
-
- Evolution is a GNOME application and a number of auxiliary
- CORBA servers that act as the storage backends.
-
- Evolution will copy the best user interface bits and the best
- ideas and features found on contemporary groupware systems.
-
-* Evolution internals.
-
- Evolution can store its information locally (files for mail,
- calendar and address book) or on a remote server (imap/pop,
- cap, ldap).
-
- Given the importance of syncing in this modern PDA world,
- the Evolution GUI acts as a client to the data repository.
- The data repository is a GUI-less CORBA server called Wombat.
-
- Wombat provides a unified access system to the calendar and
- addressbook data (doing mail is a bit hard, so we are leaving
- this as a TODO item for now).
-
- Wombat's CORBA interfaces are notifier-based. This means that
- CORBA requests sent to Wombat do not return values
- inmediately, but rather than for Wombat requests the user has
- to provide a CORBA object that will be notified of what
- happened.
-
- Yes, that sounds hairy. It is actually pretty simple. It
- basically means that you submit requests to Wombat, and a
- callback is invoked in your code when the request has been
- carried away.
-
- This enables a Palm to sync to the repository without having
- the GUI for Evolution running. It also means that volunteers
- will be able to write text-based and web-based versions of
- Evolution (not me though :-).
-
-* Evolution as a platform
-
- Evolution is more than a client for managing the above
- information: Evolution is a platform for building groupware
- applications that use the above components to get their work done.
-
- To achieve this Evolution is designed to be scriptable, and it
- exports its internals through CORBA/Bonobo. It is implemented
- as a collection of Bonobo containers and Bonobo components.
-
- There is a clean separation between the views (the user
- interface) and the model (the view). The views that we are
- writing are GNOME based, and they talk to the Wombat CORBA
- server.
-
- Wombat takes care of notifications to the various clients for
- the data.
-
-* The overall organization
-
- A bar similar to outlook provides shortcuts for accessing the
- various resources managed by Evolution: mail folders,
- contacts, tasks, journal entries, notes, messages and other
- user-defined destinations.
-
-* User interface widgets
-
-** The ETable package
-
- This package provides a way of displaying and editing tables.
-
- Tables are displayed based on a TableColumn definition that
- defines the layout used for the display. Table Columns can be
- nested, and the package does grouping of information displayed
- according to the criteria defined there.
-
- This is used in multiple places throughout evolution: it is
- used for the Mail summary display, for the TODO display and
- TODO new data entry and for the address book.
-
- Nesting in the address book can be performed on various
- fields. For example, a first level of nesting could be
- "Company" and a second level would be "Country" the result is
- a 2-level tree that can be collapsed expanded and contains the
- information sorted/grouped by those two criteria.
-
- The user interface for this will be copied from Outlook: the
- possibility of adding and removing fields with drag and drop
- as well as grouping using drag and drop.
-
-* The Mail system
-
-** The Mail sources
-
- The mail system will support 4 sources of mail:
-
- POP3 (transfer to a local file).
- IMAP
- Local mbox format in $MAIL.
- Local mbox format that have other delivery points.
-
- On top of that, it will be possible to browse existing mbox
- archives (and possibly other formats in the future, like
- Mailbox and Maildir).
-
-** Storing the mail
-
- Mail that gets incorporated into the system is stored in mbox
- format, and summary files are provided for quick access to the
- files. No modifications to the file on disk is performed (I
- am not quite sure about this, perhaps we want to add the
- status flags and some method for adding metadata to the mail).
-
- Summary files are rebuilt on demand or rebuild if the mbox
- file and the summary file have got out of sync.
-
- A Metadata system that will enable us to attach information to
- a message will have to be designed and implemented (enabling
- users to add annotations to mails, and special keywords and
- flags in a per-message fashion).
-
-** Folders
-
- Michael Zucchi is working on a system that will let users
- easily define rules for splitting their incoming mail into
- physical folders.
-
- A further refinement to Folders are Virtual Folders. This
- basically provides a powerful search and viewing facility for
- mail. It works like this: when a mail is "incorporated" into
- Evolution it is scanned and indexed.
-
- Then users can enter queries into Evolution that will search
- the entire database of messages.
-
-** Virtual folders
-
- Virtual folders will enable users to read/browse their mail in
- new ways: by specifying search criterias, these folders will
- contain messages that match the criteria given.
-
- There is more information about this in the libcamel
- directory.
-
- We will index all headers from a message, and possible the
- contents of messages and keep those on a separate file, to
- enable users to query their mail database.
-
-** Mail summary display
-
- The summary will be displayed using the ETable package, to
- enable users to add a number of sorting criteria and various
- display methods for the summary view.
-
- The Outlook methods for displaying will be present on the
- system.
-
- Message threading will be supported in Evolution.
-
-** Message display engine
-
- We are going to be using a combination of
- libcamel/limime/libjamie to parse messages and render them
- into an HTML buffer.
-
-* The HTML engine
-
- The GtkHTML engine will be used to display messages, and will
- be extended to support a number of features that we require:
- internal handling of characters will be based on Unicode
-
-* The message composer
-
- Regular features found in composers will be added: connecting
- the composer to the address book, support for drag and drop
- for including attachments, editing the message, archiving
- drafts and archiving messages sent.
-
- Ettore has been working on adding editing support to the
- GtkHTML and he is working currently on a Bonobo component that
- will provide a ready-to-use Bonobo control for embedding into
- other applications.
-