[Qt-mobility-feedback] QContactManager, Telepathy and Meego

[christopher.adams at nokia.com]

Hi Gerry,

You are correct: in the Qt Mobility Contacts API sense, Telepathy is a store of contact information, which can be exposed through a contact engine backend.  Telepathy is more than simply a contact information store, though, as you mentioned.  In the Qt Mobility Contacts API, we don't intend to expose all of the possible functionality which is supported by Telepathy, as some of it is out of scope.

However, for things like VoIP services (and other things), we are developing an API to allow users to request functionality on a contact or detail of a contact.  The current draft of the API can be found at: http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-mobility/contacts/commits/qtsw/qsfwactions

This API is under active development, and your feedback would be valuable, if you are able to take a look at it.
In short, it allows third party service providers to provide "QContactAction" plugins via the Qt Service Framework (although it is opaque to the clients of the QContactAction API that the backend uses the service framework to populate QContactAction plugins).  We still have a bit of work to complete on it, mainly around defining some default actions and implementing those default actions on various platforms, but the API will be solidified in the very near future.

For the 90% use-case, we think that these actions will suffice for clients.  There may be some situations or advanced uses where deeper, platform specific APIs must be used, of course.

For Telepathy integration, there are two components (of which I'm aware) which can enable this:
1) Contactsd
    - glue between Telepathy and Tracker
    - http://gitorious.org/qtcontacts-tracker/contactsd

2) qtcontacts-tracker Qt Mobility Contacts manager engine plugin
    - reads contact information from Tracker and presents it as QContact objects
    - http://gitorious.org/qtcontacts-tracker/qtcontacts-tracker

Both of these projects are Work In Progress, as far as I know.

Cheers,
Chris.

>-----Original Message-----
>I have a question on the scope of QT Moblity's contact management
>support.
>
>The QT Mobility QContact API supports contacts.  Telepathy also supports
>contacts for the various VOIP (as well as IM) services.  Both QT
>Mobility and Telepathy are supported on Meego, a core platform for QT
>Mobility.
>
>Does the QContact API support retrieving contacts from Telepathy (I
>presume through some contact engine backend)?  I could not find any
>reference to this capability existing.
>
>It appears that to handle VOIP services together with GSM services, one
>needs to deal with two contact API's (as well as two telephony api's but
>that's another issue...)
>
>Is this correct?
>
>Thanks
>
>-Gerry