Why a book on mobile open source sync and push e-mail? Because mobile applications and messaging are the next big thing. Over 750 million mobile devices are sold every year. The entire population of the planet will have a mobile device (in many cases, more than one) in a few years. The diffusion of mobile devices is going to surpass, by every measurement, that of personal computers. If the Internet enabled an explosion of web applications, then the new era of wireless will create incredible demand for mobile applications. One of the biggest demand is already clear nowadays. People want to keep their network of contacts always with them even when they are not at their desktop. The need for sharing contacts and messages on a wide range of devices (in particular mobile) and with a wide range of applications has become crucial. People want to keep communicating using any means of communication they have used already—voice, e-mail, Facebook, blogs, and so on.
How this can be achieved in a landscape of so divergent applications and devices? With open standard protocols and open source implementations!
This book helps you gradually learn how to provide a full featured PIM synchronization and push e-mail service. It explains in details how to set up a Funambol service that provides mobile and desktop users contacts, along with calendar synchronization and push e-mail. It starts from a simple scenario of a personal address book backup scenario to mobilize enterprise data in a realistic enterprise environment. The book is also a great starting point for those who aim to extend Funambol in a truly open source spirit.
Another reason why I decided to write this book is because I see this as a valuable contribution to the Funambol community. As I like to say when I hire Funambol developers, working for Funambol is not only about working for a company; it means being part of a community of users, developers, and projects that make a few lines of code something alive and vital, something that changes and grows every day with the contribute of everyone.
I hope you will enjoy reading the following pages and learning about Funambol, mobile sync, and push e-mail. I certainly enjoyed writing this book and I hope to see you as part of the Funambol community soon.
The book is structured in two parts.
In the first part, which contains Chapter 1 to 8, we will help Maria, the IT manager of a medium size enterprise, to deploy Funambol in her organization. We will first show them what Funambol is about (Chapter 1) and of which systems it is built of (Chapter 2). The next chapters focus on the administration functionality and tasks Maria may need for an efficient operation of Funambol, such as: administering users and devices, managing Funambol push e-mail and PIM synchronization (Chapter 4, 5, and 6). The following chapter (Chapter 7) shows how many different devices and applications can be easily used with Funambol to cover many scenarios that can be found in the real life. Finally, the last chapter (Chapter 8), tells Maria how Funambol can be extended with existing connectors to integrate with existing back ends like a CRM system.
The second part of the book is instead intended for developers who want to extend Funambol with integrations to different back ends. First, an introduction to the SyncML synchronization protocol is given (Chapter 9), so to give a common background developers can refer to; finally, a detailed description and tutorial about how to write Funambol connectors is given in the last chapter (Chapter 10).
Chapter 1: The First Sync shows how to install the server on both Linux and Windows and how to start/stop Funambol services. The reader will be guided to complete the first sync so as to make sure everything works as expected.
Chapter 2: Synchronizing Funambol shows how Funambol allows a user to sync their data and get notified of new e-mails or other personal data changes. The chapter covers what the architecture looks like from a system perspective, which components are involved and their responsibilities, and how Funambol push works.
Chapter 3: Mastering Data Synchronization tells how to comfortably configure and manage the Data Synchronization service. It will also provide general configuration concepts, acquiring the background and information needed to go in further detail in the following chapters.
Chapter 4: Administering Users and Devices will explain how to manage users and devices through the administration tool.
Chapter 5: Funambol E-mail discusses how to comfortably configure and manage the Funambol E-mail Connector.
Chapter 6: Funambol PIM Data Push shows how to comfortably work with Funambol PIM push.
Chapter 7: Synchronizing Devices and Desktops helps configure Funambol and other SyncML clients and how to synchronize devices from end to end.
Chapter 8: Making the Most of Funambol: Community and its Projects helps the reader learn about the Funambol community, how this can help a Funambol administrators and users, and which tools are available to users and developers. The reader will also learn how she can help the Funambol product or other users. In addition, as an example of how the community contributes to add value to the product, the reader will be presented a community project to integrate one of the most known CRM called SugarCRM.
Chapter 9: Introduction to SyncML, discusses in more detail, the SyncML protocol used by Funambol to synchronize personal data and e-mail.
Chapter 10: Extending the Funambol Data Synchronization Service helps the reader learn how to develop a custom connector to access an external datasource. It will go through a simple example in the form of a tutorial.
To start this book you do not need any particular software or tool. The book takes the reader through all steps needed to download, install, and use the Funambol mobile open source software. Some system administration background is recommended as the book is about deploying a PIM synchronization and mobile e-mail solution. In the second part of this book, which covers how to extend Funambol, some Java programming background is assumed.
If you are looking forward to installing and getting started with Funambol, this book is for you. You need to be technically minded and confident with a bit of code tweaking, but not a developer.
General server administration skills are assumed and familiarity with Java will be a benefit in places.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Standard options of a JVM can be set in the JAVA_OPTS environment variable before starting Funambol."
A block of code will be set as follows:
DEBUG [main]: Message 1 WARN [main]: Message 2
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:
<void method="setProperty"> <string>username</string> <string>syncuser</string> </void>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ bin/admin-passwd
Changing password for admin
New terms andimportant words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "Maria can access the loggers available in the server by expanding the Server settings | Logging node ".
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply drop an e-mail to [email protected], and mention the book title in the subject of your message.
If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note in the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com or e-mail [email protected].
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Note
Downloading the example code for the book
Visit http://www.packtpub.com/files/code/ 1540_Code.zip to directly download the example code.
The downloadable files contain instructions on how to use them.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our contents, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in text or code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration, and help us to improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the let us know link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata added to any list of existing errata. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
You can contact us at [email protected] if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.