Re: [Evolution-hackers] Using Evolution as a data source in GNOME Office

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo ximian com>]

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 21:26, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> Hey Rodrigo,
> 
> On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 19:35, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > I've just started a libgda provider for accessing Evolution data (tasks,
> > calendar, contacts). It's in GNOME CVS, in the gda-evolution module.
> 
> I don't know much about libgda so excuse me if it's a dumb question,
> but: wouldn't it be better to work on fixing the current APIs (as Christ
> as been doing with EBook) instead of writing a libgda provider?
> 
yes, maybe. Although as AbiWord and Gnumeric are already using libgda as
a way of accessing different data sources (databases, XML files, dBase
files), adding support to access Evolution data as alibgd a provider was
the simplest way for giving access to those apps to Evo data.

The libgda provider uses libcal-client, and will be using EBook API, so
the dependency on Evolution libraries will be just in gda-evolution (a
separated plugin, not part of libgda), and not on every GNOME Office
app.

That is, libgda is the 'standard' way of accessing data, and any data
source we want to access from GO apps is better done as a libgda plugin
than using directly the required libs on each GO app. GO apps just have
to link against libgda, and this gives them support for doing SQL
queries (as well as XML queries) to the data source, even if the data
source in question is not SQL-oriented, and an easy way to retrieve the
data, and, if they want, to modify it.

cheers