Re: Epiphany and Sync (in relation to GSoC)

[calvin <chenmingyang ict gmail com>]

Hello,
I'm a graduate student in Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
I'm interested in the “Sync for Epiphany” idea in GSoC2012.

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 13:48 PM, Xan Lopez <xan gnome org> wrote:
>>> - Start with something done just in the browser, like Firefox or
>>> Chrome, possibly (but not sure yet) using the spec Mozilla wrote for
>>> data sync (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync)
>>
>> So what would the in browser sync be capable of syncing from/to? It
>> could be directly integrated in to Mozilla's sync system?
>
>Reading the page I linked to it seems Mozilla offers a free of charge
>Sync server for anyone to use, so if we follow their design strictly
>we might be able to use it. At the very least it seems like a sensible
>option for something under the GSoC scope (since setting up our own
>infrastructure would be time consuming).

>From the Firefox developers, I confirmed that anyone can indeed use Mozilla’s Sync server in his/her own client for free. If we use it, certainly we will use the APIs and “storage format” defined by Mozilla. However, one of the Firefox code committers said we have to use the format of Firefox bookmarks, user passwords, preferences, etc (not our own format). I feel puzzled because the payload of the records are all encrypted as [1] mentions, hence the server knows nothing about what the client puts into the payload. So I’m reading the Firfox Sync service specifications. Do you think I’m on the right way regarding the GSoC program?
I really appreciate any feedback on the sync service so that I can detail or be inspired about what should be done. 
Looking forward to your comments.

>>> - Try to do this globally in GNOME as a service, that perhaps at first
>>> could only deal with the browser data.
>>> This will for sure be harder, since you'll have to convince a bunch of
>>> people about how to go about it, but I think long-term it is the way
>>> to go.
>>
>> How does this differ from Conduit? It can already sync bookmarks (or
>> at least thats what the gui suggests, I am yet to test it) from
>> Firefox and Google and from and to Nautilus. Surely doing something
>> with this framework would be far more powerful and flexible?
>
>From what I remember from Conduit it seems to me it would need large
>changes to fit in the GNOME3 design, so it would be quite a bit of
>work anyway. I'm not sure of how much from it we could reuse.

Best regards,
Calvin

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Developer/StorageFormat