Re: Online Desktop, Tomboy, and user storage (was Re: Dogfood servers now up)

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

On 8/2/07, Sanford Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong gmail com> wrote:
> On 8/1/07, Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Sanford Armstrong wrote:
> > > How does this fit into the grand scheme of the online desktop?  Tomboy
> > > can't be the only app that wants to store real data (not just
> > > configuration data) out there.  I know Mugshot is meant mostly to bind
> > > existing services together, but how is a small free software project
> > > supposed to find the resources to offer a stable and performant web
> > > service to a large number of users?  The answer for the Online Desktop
> > > can't always be "store your data in an existing cool (proprietary)
> > > service".  GNOME is going to have to become a service provider.
> >
> > I agree, the only way to make service-provider-dependent features usable
> > is to have at least a default provider available, though people can also
> > host their own.
> >
> > What is your order of magnitude on the size of someone's Tomboy notes?
> > If they aren't very big then let's just try to get it going now. I can
> > help on the server side if you can point me to some sense of what the
> > data looks like, relevant source code, etc.

I agree with Sandys asessment on the need for this. When I looked into
writing some kind of .Mac equivilent for Conduit to use as a central
store to sync stuff with I inevitably came back to the same point, why
write my own backend anything when things like WebDav and gnomevfs
support for it already exist.

According to http://live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop we will basically
store account info for people and the services they use. I dont think
reinventing the wheel and writing a server side backend to store
generic use data is all that effective use of time (putting aside
concerns like bandwidth, storage space and security for the moment).
Why not use apaches WebDav support and have it authenticate against
online.gnome.org.

John