Contacts Kit, Community Bonding Period

During the community bonding period, i have researched around the project to prepare my work for the coding days that will follow. I also promised to talk with the other devs in the ml, it was not necessary in these days…i’m working with the help of Alex to a document describing the entire API in order to discuss it in the ml.

The first problem was to choose a Default Media Format for contact translators, my choice has been addressed to a flattened BMessage. BMessage will be used internally by BContact to represent the contact fields and the state of the object. BContact will be also a BArchivable object.

All that could look strange for a naive, but there are some aspects that should not be underestimated :

1. Easily sendable through applications and network (useful in future when sync support will come)
2. Make simple to save the state of an object on a disk and then restore it at the next boot

So one of the most important aspects of BMessage is their flexibility in storing informations. The contact kit will define a set of fields used to represent a generic contact in memory, but it’s too restrictive! Apps and addons should be able to define custom types of fields since the API cannot in any case define a set of fields generic enough to support every existent and future API. This is already an obscure side for me and i need some hours to make clarity and choose the best solution.

Portable Contacts

Portable Contacts is REST API using OAuth with the aim to provide a generic access to contacts from different services, at the moment it support many services like the OpenSocial platform. Who has read my proposal probably remember something about a “Google Contacts Services Add-On”. I have decided to switch it into a “Portable Contacts Addon”. For more informations : http://portablecontacts.net/.

Goals For the first quarter

• A little patch for the translation kit to support the Contacts translators
• Basic BContact Implementation
• vCard and People translators