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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. + |