Re: SyncML

Quoting Tom <tom@lemuria.org>:

> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 09:07:06AM -0500,
> Derrell.Lipman@UnwiredUniverse.com wrote:
> > There has been some discussion of using a database *server* on the
> > iPAQ to allow each of the applications to read and write its data
> > from/to. Given that server, there's no reason that synchronization
> > couldn't take place via the host connecting to the iPAQ's database
> > server and issuing the synchronization query. (And if the iPAQ is
> the
> > one that decides that it is now in range of the host and wants to
> > initiate a sync, it can issue an ssh command to run on that host to
> > retrieve the synchronization data.)

> sqlite, if that is the engine we choose, does not run a server. it's a
> library that does direct file access.

I remember someone mentioning that we could use RPC for getting data from the
iPAQ on a remote host. What it would take to allow us to make RPCs to the
sqlite library I don't know.

So, I think there are two options -- (1) making sqlite's storage schema work
with rsync and (2) making the sqlite library capable of accepting RPC calls.
At the moment, I prefer using option 2. Using RPC would allow us to have finer
control and write applications that can do more that just synchronize the
database.

There is a third, albeit theoretical, solution. That is to use some sort of
ODBC-ODBC bridge software so that we can expose the ODBC datasources (read
sqlite data) on the iPAQ to remote hosts. There is a commercial product that
does this (http://freshmeat.net/projects/odbcodbcbridge/) but the only GPL'd
software that I have found that can expose ODBC datasources to other machines
is "ODBC Socket Server" (http://odbc.sourceforge.net/). The problem with ODBC
Socket Server is that the server piece is only implemented as a Windows NT
service. Also, ODBC Socket Server introduces another layer in between the ODBC-
ODBC bridge that requires you to use their client piece.

We could try to take their code and port the server piece to Linux. However,
we would have to use their client piece as well in order to speak the protocol
the server is expecting.

I'll continue researching the third option.

Brent
Received on Thu Jan 3 08:41:28 2002