[ILUG] "Evolution" - it'll rock, apparently (long)

[John P. Looney]

 From the slashdot interview with Miguel de Icaza, for those that don't read slashdot.

  Evolution is probably the most exciting application that is
  being developed in the GNOME world right now. 

  First, Evolution is based entirely on Bonobo components. It
  is one of GNOME's proving grounds for component-based
  programming. We have spent over a year developing the
  Bonobo component model, and in Evolution it's beginning
  to pay off in a big way. Each component in Evolution
  (mail, calendar, tasks, notes, contacts) is a Bonobo
  component, fully CORBA accessible (to enable automation
  and scripting of applications, and yes, it is secure. We do
  not feed any unsecured data into components, in case you
  were wondering). 

  The component-based pluggable architecture means that
  we can make Evolution into a universal communicator. So,
  yes, we have every intention of integrating with Exchange
  environments. Picture an office populated by Outlook
  clients and an Exchange server or a Lotus Notes server; we
  can infiltrate that place from the bottom up by making
  Evolution talk to those Exchanges or Notes servers. Clients
  can upgrade to Evolution one by one, without the
  requirement of a top-down organizational decision to dump
  Microsoft. 

  This is how GNU/Linux won. This is how we will win. 

  But the beauty of Evolution's architecture goes much
  further. It is the first communications tool designed for
  modern users like the free software community. The free
  software community stays in touch thanks to e-mail and as
  we grow, we need more powerful and efficient tools to
  handle our communication loads. 

  For example, I receive about 2500 mails a day. Even with
  procmail and Gnus, filters, scoring and lots of complex
  scripts, I still spend about four hours a day on e-mail
  related tasks. And it is pretty hard to find information on
  the gigabyte of mail that I have archived over the last few
  years. Traditional mail tools are not keeping up with the
  demands of modern Internet citizens like myself. 

  We believe that the mail loads that most free software
  developers are handling these days are going to become
  the norm for normal users in the future as the Internet
  becomes more ubiquitous and e-mail becomes the tool of
  choice for communication. 

  Evolution scales to mammoth mail loads perfectly, though.
  The hackers in the Evolution team designed the entire
  system to scale: we avoid copying data wherever possible,
  we never load the whole message into memory even over
  IMAP, and we used asynchronous interfaces across the
  board. 

  Now, the real beauty is that we index all of the mail as we
  incorporate it into our mailboxes. Dan Winship wrote this
  beautiful indexing library called libibex which we use for
  indexing and Michael Zucchi is working together with him
  in our vFoldering setup. So you can treat all of your
  archived mail as a giant database, and perform queries on it
  (think "Altavista for your mail"). So you will finally be
  able to find information in your mailbox, and you will
  finally be able to keep track of things. 

  And then you can save that query as a "virtual folder"
  (vFolder). So in fact your folders are actually the results of
  searches on your mail. 

  Also every element in evolution can be annotated and
  annotations can be cross referenced, so you can keep track
  of your contacts, your tasks and your information flow
  more easily. 

  And that's just part of the whole system. We are working
  on fully networked calendaring and contact management,
  too. So you can schedule appointments with people over
  the Internet, and have servers storing address-books. We
  are going to have a gnome.org Evolution server with all of
  the address-book entries for all the GNOME hackers. 

  The system is still under development, of course, but it's
  the most fun thing to hack on, and we are applying a lot of
  the tricks we have learned over the past years and enjoying
  the result. 

  Evolution is not only limited to handling the standard
  Personal Information Management features, but through
  Bonobo components you can plug any sort of
  communication system and have it integrated with the rest
  of the system. So hopefully, your irc conversations will
  also be fully indexed, as well as any other personal
  messaging system that ships with Bonobo support. 

  Think "deep integration" and think "I can find that e-mail". 

  If you want to learn more about Evolution, I suggest you
  check its Web page here, and as with every other free
  software project, we would love to see you join the effort,
  and help us get this out and deployed. 


-- 
"The fool must be beaten with a stick, for an intelligent person 
the merest hint is sufficient"                -- Zen Master Greg