[Bitpim-devel] Re: Bitpim-devel digest, Vol 1 #49 - 2 msgs

[Tim Bain]

Roger, I'm interested in helping out with the address book
synchronization with the Windows Address Book. WAB exposes
an API that is essentially a subset of the MAPI interface, and I've
explored it enough to understand how it works and how to use it.
Unfortunately for BitPim, the API is written in C++, which is bad
because it will require interfacing with Python. Also, I don't know
any Python, so I could either 1) learn it and write everything
(feasible but potentially slow given my time constraints), or 2) write
a C++ interface to do the bulk of the work and then let you deal
with the Python integration. This is all, of course, under the
assumption that there is currently no one else working on WAB
funcitonality. Where does this module stand and what can I do to
help?

Tim

[Roger Binns]

Post by Tim Bain
Roger, I'm interested in helping out with the address book
synchronization with the Windows Address Book. WAB exposes
an API that is essentially a subset of the MAPI interface, and I've
explored it enough to understand how it works and how to use it.
Unfortunately for BitPim, the API is written in C++, which is bad
because it will require interfacing with Python.

You underestimate Python :-) You can trivially do COM from Python.
Also the win32all stuff I already use also includes MAPI support.
The spambayes project includes even more Python/MAPI stuff.

You can also directly load the wab.dll into the process and make calls
that way.

What would be most useful is the following:

- Generating a nice large address book of about 100 entries that
can be used for testing. Ideally I would want them in a form
directly importable into Outlook, Windows Address Book (aka OE),
Vcard, Palm Desktop and Mozilla. A lot of the data should be
very hairy.

- Minimal C, C++ or any other language code that shows the minimum
necessary to read (and later write) some of the entries. I will
convert it to a standalone Python file that dumps out the information
and we can take it from there. (That may reveal the need for
custom C/C++ code, but usually just reveals the need for more
knowledge of the quirks of the API).

Post by Tim Bain
This is all, of course, under the
assumption that there is currently no one else working on WAB
funcitonality.

Noone to my knowledge yet. I am expecting the release of BitPim 0.6
very early next week, and then it is onto this stuff. I just finished
setup on a machine with Outlook as well.

Post by Tim Bain
Where does this module stand and what can I do to
help?

Test data, and pointers to working code in any language are the most
useful. Later on, testing the code, provoking errors etc are useful
too.

Roger