Re: beagle xesam

["Arun Raghavan" <arunissatan gmail com>]

Hey dBera,

On 02/12/2007, D Bera <dbera web gmail com> wrote:
> Hi Arun,
>   So beagle-xesam-0.1 was also released yesterday. Congratulations and thanks.
>   Would you mind giving a few details on what exactly it does now ?
> How can it be used ? Where does it sit between beagle and xesam (pun
> intended) ? Where does it go from here ?

Sorry about the late response. I've been busy heading to
http://Foss.in then back.

Basically the adaptor as it stands allows Xesam clients to connect to
it, and pass it queries. The adaptor acts as a translator between the
Xesam API and Beagle's native API. It takes Xesam queries over DBus,
passes them on to beagled, and the hits back in Xesam-ese.
Beagle-Xesam largely conforms to the latest (RC1) Xesam spec.

Currently the only Xesam clients out there are a command-line tool and
a simple test GUI that Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen has written. These
can be found with the xesam-tools package [1]. Hopefully this will
change soon, since there are 3 Xesam servers that are now out there
(Beagle, Strigi, and Pinot). A simple starting point could be a
deskbar [3] plugin that talks Xesam.

There are some issues to be resolved. I've catalogued some of these at
[2]. One major thing I've not yet added there is that we don't fully
support the Xesam "user query" language per se. It does bear strong
resemblance to the standard Beagle query syntax, though, so this
should be fine for now.

To summarize, the basic adaptor is functional as it stands. The path
ahead should become clearer as clients that use the spec arise.

-- Arun

[1] http://xesam.org/people/kamstrup/xesam-tools/
[2] http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/beagle/trunk/beagle-xesam/ISSUES?view=markup
[3] http://raphael.slinckx.net/deskbar/