barry - Design
Architecture

Barry is designed to be modular in many ways.

First the core protocols will be stored in a library so that it can be used in other applications.

Second, a command-line tool will be used to present the user with a scriptable option in dealing with the BlackBerry ™ device. This will come in handy in conjunction with hotplug.

Third, a GUI tool will be used to allow users to directly manage devices and make backups of their data.

Fourth, an OpenSync Plugin will provide general synchronization support for Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, and Memos; and the OpenSync framework will provide the synchronization support for the other side of the equation. (Evolution, Sunbird, etc.)

Design Goals

Flexible Synchronization Targets: The main goal of barry is to synchronize data. This is complicated by the fact that the data on a user's computer could be stored in many different formats. Email, contact, calendar entries, notes, and bookmarks are the main data that we are concerned with and users may be using one of many programs to manage their data. To address this barry needs to be flexible in how it supports synchronization. It should be easy to add new synchronization targets to barry and easy to select these targets from the user interface.

Open Data Formats: Backup of the BlackBerry ™ data should be stored and read in open data formats. LDIF for example is a suitable format for contacts, mbox format is a perfect format for email data, text files are a good format for notes, and HTML is a suitable format for bookmarks. The backup GUI stores its raw backup data in gzipped tar file format.

Multi-Device: A user may need to manage more than one device on a single user profile. Barry will be able to treat each device independantly to allow it to sync differently, backup/restore to different targets, etc. This will come in handy when users are upgrading to a new device, or when one user handles backup for more than one person.

Device Support: initially we will be supporting the 7750 devices, because that's what we are using. We do have a 6750 here as well, but since it is a discontinued product we are not testing on it. The 7750 has a USB interface to the PC and we expect that there will not be significant changes between devices.

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