Akonadi

Infobox software
Akonadi
developer = KDE
operating_system = Unix-like
genre = Personal information management
license = GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1
website = http://pim.kde.org/akonadi/

Akonadi is a personal information management (PIM) framework for KDE 4.1 and newer. [ [http://dot.kde.org/1206623838/ Akonadi Sprint Readies for KDE 4.1] ] Akonadi will function as an extensible data storage for all PIM applications. In KDE 3 all PIM applications had different data storage and handling methods, which lead to several implementations of essentially the same features. Besides data storage, Akonadi has several other components including search, and a library (cache) for easy access and notification of data changes. Recent Akonadi builds address a memory issue in which two application requesting the same data caused that data to be loaded into memory twice. With Akonadi functioning as a server this problem is avoided. [ [http://conference2006.kde.org/conference/talks/9.php aKademy 2006: Akonadi – The KDE 4.0 PIM Framework] ]

Akonadi communicates with servers to fetch and send data instead of applications through a specialized API. Data can then be retrieved from Akonadi by a model designed to collect a specific data (mail, calendar, contacts, etc). The application itself will be made of viewers and editors to display data to the user and let them input data. Akonadi will also support metadata created by applications. [ [http://dot.kde.org/1177506111/ Akonadi Hacking Meeting] ]

Because Akonadi takes care of data storage and retrieval, which are traditionally the difficult parts of creating a PIM application, development of PIM applications is made much easier. Using Akonadi, the mail viewer component of Mailody was created in only 10 minutes. [ [http://www.omat.nl/drupal/creating-mail-reader-10-minutes Tom Albers: Creating a mail reader in 10 minutes.] ]

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