Re: [tomboy-list] Helping Tomboy users of Ubuntu One



Timo, you're my hero! I'm glad you're here to pick up my slack, I just haven't had time/energy to work on the syncing work since the summer.

Rainy with U1DB support so that Ubuntu can continue to offer note syncing sounds like a good idea, as I think that even after Tomboy was bumped from the default install the note sync has been an important vector for recruiting Tomboy users.

/Robert

On 11 Dec 2012 18:25, "Timo Dörr" <timo latecrew de> wrote:
Actually, by coincidence, I was working on separating the data backend layer in Rainy before the ubuntu one EOL for notes arrived at this mailing list :) I've been working hard the last few days on Rainy, as well as in the tomboy-library sync_from_scratch branch. My goal is to have tomboy-library carry a bunch of unit tests for filesystem as well as websync (no matter if using u1db, rainy, snowy). I hope to get this done by end of december.

As of today, I got some basic unit tests into rainy (https://github.com/Dynalon/Rainy/tree/wip) that use tomboy-library ISyncServer / WebSyncServer implementation from my custom tomboy-library branch (https://github.com/Dynalon/tomboy-library/tree/sync_wip) to try to achieve as much code reuse from tomboy-library as possible (i.e. the (de-)serialization of the JSON object's as well as the webservice request/response definition is currently shared). But the code is not yet ready for pull requests, just pushed it to github in case somebody wants to take a look. Hope to send a pull request before the new year.

When that is done, and most of the syncing unit tests i got in place for filesystem syncing also work for websync with rainy  (using  the existing tomboy-library xmlfile-based storage engine), I would move on and implement a SQL backend for Rainy. That would basically mean implement a custom IStorage and/or Engine class to replace those present in tomboy-library, using some relational database as backend (maybe using NHibernate to target multiple). The OAuth stuff requires some SQL storage backend, too.

Note that this does NOT mean Tomboy or Tomdroid must shift to tomboy-library. I just want to have GUI-free, complex sync scenarios in unit tests against Rainy before entering an open beta phase.

The design I want to achieve, would allow anyone to run a simple Rainy instance using simple files as data storage backend on its home/private server, as well as running it as a "cloud server" with the SQL backend serving multiple (hopefully thousands) of users. I have no idea how many users are actively using u1 to sync their tomboy notes, and I can make no guarantees about the performance of Rainy in a heavy load environment. We just have to try that and see :)

Greetz
Timo



2012/12/11 Jared Jennings <jared jaredjennings org>
Stuart,

My take is that it is a very good thing to have Ubuntu host a server. I believe it gives users a sense of "completeness" and ease when storing notes. I know Snowy is hosted by GNOME, but never was promoted and was by invite only.

Currently I'm for promoting Rainy instead of Snowy. (1) It has an active developer, (2) it is using a more common programming language than Snowy.

So with all that said I would like to see Ubuntu continue to support a sync server for Tomboy and the Tomboy community can help this be accomplished. Secondly I would like to see a polished solution for self hosting Tomboy. Maybe this would include the Rainy project that could be deployed in OpenStack or Amazon, things like that. Additionally we will soon be supporting Dropbox. I don't have a timeframe on this, but it's in the works.

We would have to talk with Dynalon, but he might be able to crank out support for u1db by end of January.

Jared

On Dec 6, 2012, at 3:11 PM, Stuart Langridge <stuart langridge canonical com> wrote:

Hello, Tomboy hackers!

A while back we implemented Tomboy's Snowy web sync API at Ubuntu One (before our first beta release, actually :)). Its backend on our servers was CouchDB, which at that point was planned to be our standard data sync API. As some of you may know, that didn't work out; we dropped support for CouchDB a year or so ago. We've built u1db, which is much better at the data sync tasks that we want to do with Ubuntu One, and that's now released and has become U1's standard data sync infrastructure.

The Snowy API implementation we built at Ubuntu One is something we've been unable to put the time into that we want; I know the Tomdroid and WebNotes and Chalk developers have had some issues syncing with it, and it really needs some extra work, because it's not as well-built as we'd like. This has now got to the point where we can't afford to support it any more, especially since it's currently forcing us to keep Couch alive to keep it running. What this means is that we're going to close that API. Now, we've got a bunch of users using Tomboy with Ubuntu One, and we like notes sync, so we'd like there to be an alternative. There are a couple of ideas here:

Tomboy could grow a u1db backend. I know that there's been some talk in the past about swappable backends for Tomboy, and if that work's going on, I'd be happy to provide enough information about u1db to enable someone to write a Tomboy backend which uses u1db to store notes (and thus can sync with Ubuntu One). If someone's interested in doing that, I'd like to hear from them.

Alternatively, we can make it easy for people currently using Tomboy and syncing with Ubuntu One to switch to another Snowy API service. I know people have been working on Tomboy Online, and we could talk about how we (U1) can encourage people to switch to Tomboy Online if they prefer. There are also standalone Snowy API servers: Rainy and Midgard2, and we could provide instructions on how a technical user might set up their own server using these. I'd like to hear any ideas people might have on how we can make it easy for Tomboy users to keep having their notes synced, and which services there are which provide the Snowy API which we could encourage users to join up with.

Perhaps there's another approach that I haven't thought of? The important thing here is people using Tomboy can continue to use it if they want; U1 is closing the existing notes sync service but we want to make it easy for people to move to the best alternative, whoever provides that alternative. Your thoughts are invited!

Stuart Langridge, U1 API bloke



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