aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/help/Design
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorArturo Espinosa <unammx@src.gnome.org>2000-01-26 08:49:38 +0800
committerArturo Espinosa <unammx@src.gnome.org>2000-01-26 08:49:38 +0800
commit3d79779ce2cc9b1c00dc3081da2264f25e652ac4 (patch)
treeac2cffa50edbb5caa050087ad4ad4102070fc8a3 /help/Design
parent9f31ce86ff0ac0c7997e977647339ffb2db0fd63 (diff)
downloadgsoc2013-evolution-3d79779ce2cc9b1c00dc3081da2264f25e652ac4.tar.gz
gsoc2013-evolution-3d79779ce2cc9b1c00dc3081da2264f25e652ac4.tar.zst
gsoc2013-evolution-3d79779ce2cc9b1c00dc3081da2264f25e652ac4.zip
Updated
svn path=/trunk/; revision=1637
Diffstat (limited to 'help/Design')
-rw-r--r--help/Design74
1 files changed, 70 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/help/Design b/help/Design
index ae5cb911eb..7b7cf6f821 100644
--- a/help/Design
+++ b/help/Design
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ Miguel de Icaza.
Evolution is a project aiming at providing the free software
community with a professional, high-quality tool for managing
mail, appointments, tasks and other personal information
- tools.
+ tools.
We want to make Evolution a system that addresses our needs
(the free software development community) and we believe that
@@ -20,11 +20,60 @@ Miguel de Icaza.
features, and to make the user interface as pretty and
polished as possible.
- Evolution is a GNOME application.
+ Evolution is a GNOME application and a number of auxiliary
+ CORBA servers that act as the storage backends.
Evolution will copy the best user interface bits and the best
ideas and features found on contemporary groupware systems.
+* Evolution internals.
+
+ Evolution can store its information locally (files for mail,
+ calendar and address book) or on a remote server (imap/pop,
+ cap, ldap).
+
+ Given the importance of syncing in this modern PDA world,
+ the Evolution GUI acts as a client to the data repository.
+ The data repository is a GUI-less CORBA server called Wombat.
+
+ Wombat provides a unified access system to the calendar and
+ addressbook data (doing mail is a bit hard, so we are leaving
+ this as a TODO item for now).
+
+ Wombat's CORBA interfaces are notifier-based. This means that
+ CORBA requests sent to Wombat do not return values
+ inmediately, but rather than for Wombat requests the user has
+ to provide a CORBA object that will be notified of what
+ happened.
+
+ Yes, that sounds hairy. It is actually pretty simple. It
+ basically means that you submit requests to Wombat, and a
+ callback is invoked in your code when the request has been
+ carried away.
+
+ This enables a Palm to sync to the repository without having
+ the GUI for Evolution running. It also means that volunteers
+ will be able to write text-based and web-based versions of
+ Evolution (not me though :-).
+
+* Evolution as a platform
+
+ Evolution is more than a client for managing the above
+ information: Evolution is a platform for building groupware
+ applications that use the above components to get their work done.
+
+ To achieve this Evolution is designed to be scriptable, and it
+ exports its internals trough CORBA/Bonobo. It is implemented
+ as a collection of Bonobo containers and Bonobo components.
+
+ There is a clean separation between the views (the user
+ interface) and the model (the view). The views that we are
+ writing are GNOME based, and they talk to the Wombat CORBA
+ server.
+
+ Wombat takes care of notifications to the various clients for
+ the data.
+
* The overall organization
A bar similar to outlook provides shortcuts for accessing the
@@ -88,6 +137,20 @@ Miguel de Icaza.
users to add annotations to mails, and special keywords and
flags in a per-message fashion).
+** Folders
+
+ Michael Zucchi is working on a system that will let users
+ easily define rules for splitting their incoming mail into
+ physical folders.
+
+ A further refinement to Folders are Virtual Folders. This
+ basically provides a powerful search and viewing facility for
+ mail. It works like this: when a mail is "incorporated" into
+ Evolution it is scanned and indexed.
+
+ Then users can enter queries into Evolution that will search
+ the entire database of messages.
+
** Virtual folders
Virtual folders will enable users to read/browse their mail in
@@ -131,5 +194,8 @@ Miguel de Icaza.
for including attachments, editing the message, archiving
drafts and archiving messages sent.
- We will probably be extending the GtkHTML engine to support
- editing of HTML text.
+ Ettore has been working on adding editing support to the
+ GtkHTML and he is working currently on a Bonobo component that
+ will provide a ready-to-use Bonobo control for embedding into
+ other applications.
+