[Evolution] Coming Soon in Evolution 3.4

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

I blogged [1] about some of the major features the Evolution team has
cooking for the next major release in March.

The blog is a good way to reach the larger GNOME audience, but I also
want to make sure I reach _this_ audience.  So I'm re-posting it here.

Enjoy,
Matthew Barnes

--

Iâm overdue for an update on what the Evolution team has been up to
lately.  This development cycle should be interesting, as we have
several projects converging for the next major release in March:
Evolution 3.4. Itâs still pretty early in the 3.3 cycle, so everything
is still tentative at this point. But hereâs some of the major features
we have cooking, in addition to our steady stream of bug fixes and
incremental enhancements.


New D-Bus Service for Email

Srinivasa Ragavan is working toward breaking email handling out of
Evolution and moving it out to a separate D-Bus service as we do
currently for address books and calendars. That will allow for things
like new mail notifications without having to have Evolution running,
and also provide a more formal way for other Evolution-Data-Server
clients to access mail stores.


Evolution, Meet WebKit

Dan Vratil has taken on the task of porting Evolutionâs email rendering
from our old and outdated HTML engine (âGtkHtmlâ) to the more modern
WebKit/GTK+. Dan tells me heâs taking advantage of WebKitâs full support
for JavaScript and CSS (which GtkHtml lacks) to make rendering more
efficient and to unify the email, contact, task, and memo previews with
a shared style.

Weâre treating email rendering and email composing as separate projects.
Right now itâs looking like weâll continue using GtkHtml for email
composing in Evolution 3.4, but fear not -- weâll get to it. Weâre as
eager to drop GtkHtml as anyone.


Automated Account Setup

Punit Jain is merging the automated mail account setup feature from
âexpressâ mode into the regular Evolution Account Assistant. This is the
feature where you give Evolution your email address and it checks the
addressâs domain against a database of known service providers and can
often populate all the server details for you, making account setup
quick and easy.


Goodbye GConf

Rodrigo Moya has been porting all of Evolutionâs simple GConf keys to
dconf and fixing up our code to access the new keys via GLibâs own
GSettings API. So one less package dependency for Evolution 3.4. As for
the not-so-simple GConf keys, see below.


New Backend for Microsoft Exchange

David Woodhouse and his team at Intel, along with Chenthill Palanisamy
at Novell, have developed a new Evolution backend that can talk to
Microsoft Exchange 2007 and 2010 by way of Microsoftâs âExchange Web
Servicesâ, a publicly documented SOAP-based API.

The new backend package is called âevolution-ewsâ.

In order to avoid all the craziness of the GNOME 2-to-3 transition, the
backend was originally developed exclusively for Evolution 2.32.
Chenthill has been busy porting it forward to 3.2 so it can start
syncing up with GNOMEâs regular release schedule.

Hopefully Microsoft will stick to its Web Services interface for a good
long while so we can stop having to write new Exchange backends every
few years.  :)


New Backend for the Kolab Groupware

Christian Hilberg and his team at kernel concepts and tarent GmbH have
developed a brand new Evolution backend for Kolab Groupware servers.

The new backend package is called âevolution-kolabâ.

As with, âevolution-ewsâ, the initial development was targeted at a
fixed and now older version of Evolution, and Christian is ready to
begin forward porting it and eventually syncing up with GNOMEâs regular
release schedule.


Saner Account Storage

As for me, Iâve been toiling away for most the year on those
not-so-simple GConf keys I mentioned earlier -- the ones that we stuff
account information into in the form of XML blobs.

Evolutionâs account storage will soon move to plain text files in a
simpler .ini-style syntax. Account data will be easier to read, easier
to edit, easier to back up, easier copy to other systems.

Weâll also introduce another new D-Bus service to manage these account
files and also centralize some account-related background jobs that
Evolution currently handles (but shouldnât) such as GNOME Online
Accounts monitoring.

I could ramble on about this but Iâll save it for a separate blog post.


[1] http://mbarnes.livejournal.com/4590.html