Friday, July 06, 2007

Mr Beagle, you are on the air

Back in India, I did one good thing. Finished adding Alexis Christoforides' project of Google Summer of Code 2006 Beagle over the network. Its a bit untested with the recent versions of beagle and I didn't read the code completely, so I left it in a separate branch for the time being.

What can you do with this wonderful project ?
- Start beagled on one machine
- Add that machine (with port 4000) to the list of neighbourhood nodes via beagle-config on a second machine in the network
- Remotely query the beagled on the first machine from the second machine

The SoC project was a complete one, with GUI support. However, I only added the basic infrastructure and enabled the cli tool beagle-query to query remotely. I am not sure if querying for emails remotely makes sense, how will the results be opened ? As of now, only the filesystem backend is enabled to send query over the network.

Ideally, beagle should automatically find out other networked beagled in the network. Don't despair, there was another SoC project in 2006, Avahi Integration by Kyle Ambroff doing exactly that. Sadly I am too preoccupied to work on integrating the Avahi work. But with that and the GUI parts of Network Beagle, beagle would be useful in more ways than ever.

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