[nd] Android

[Stefano Maffull]

Hi 

On Sat, 2009-08-15 at 14:33 -0400, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> What I would *love* is a turnkey setup, preferably a Debian package, that 
> created a SyncML server for the Android Client and told you exactly what 
> settings to put in the Android Client on the phone.
>
> Perhaps said turnkey setup could create a web document that, when opened 
> on the phone, prompts the user for confirmation then automatically 
> configures the phone.
> 
> This fixes one major obstacle with personal, family, and small-business 
> use of SyncML - configuration. It's easier to use Google's synchronization 
> mostly because they do all the setup before the phone comes out of the 
> box. But an automatic configuration system would drastically improve 
> things.

I see what you mean. In fact, the automatic setup of mobile phone
clients is part of the proprietary knowledge that the company Funambol
sells to its big customers: the company has developed a huge database of
settings for each phone and networks out there, so that the users don't
have to manually setup anything (if you want to see what I mean, you can
use the gratis http://my.funambol.com). 

If you have to support only one type of client (android) all you need is
to send automatically to the phone the IP address of the syncml server,
username and password. That shouldn't be difficult to do, maybe using
also the Device Management server (another piece of the Funambol
framework). The DS server could take some work to package for
Debian/Ubuntu because right now the server is distributed bundled with
its own Tomcat and JRE. Nonetheless, there are some people that run the
Funambol DS server in other environments (http://bit.ly/CjhiJ, for
example).

> That's exciting! Pehraps the above turnkey setup would be a valid 
> project?

Packaging the server to run on a vanilla Ubuntu/Debian would be a
starting point.  The automatic setup of android clients can be added,
too, but you'd probably need to develop something (a DM client?) for
Android in order to configure it remotely (unless there is already
something --not sure).  Have you already played around with the Funambol
DS server?

/stef