Welcome to pysyncml

Welcome to the pysyncml library, a pure-python implementation of the SyncML adapter framework and protocol. SyncML is a protocol for allowing abstract objects to be synchronized between multiple clients and a server.

Goals

The pysyncml project has the following goals, some of them diverge critically from other SyncML implementations and are the reasons for creating a new package instead of building on other existing implementations:

• Can be installed and used with a single “pip install pysyncml” (or easy_install).

• Is python 2.6+ and 3+ compatible.

• Implements a sufficiently large subset of the SyncML 1.2.2 (a.k.a. the OMA Data Synchronization specification) as to be interoperable with other implementations without necessarily being “conformant”.

• Can be easily integrated into sqlalchemy based projects to store data in the application’s database instead of separated out (so that integrated database triggers and cascading can be applied).

• Can be extended in order to make properly crafted clients able to operate in “distributed” mode - this means that in the absence of a network, SyncML client peers are able to synchronize with each other in the anticipation that the central server may or may not eventually become available again.

• Differentiates as little as possible between “client” and “server” modes to enable the previous goal.

• Makes basic synchronization easy and complicated synchronization possible by providing standard implementations for commonly used approaches, while allowing these components to be overriden or extended.

• Provides basic command line tools for commonly synchronized data types.

• Provides a framework of server-push notifications which are transport agnostic.

• Auto-discovery of SyncML server URI locations; i.e. finding the “right” paths to bind object types is done automatically instead of needing error-prone user configuration.

Limitations

It is the goal of the project to get a minimally functional library going in the shortest possible timeframe. To that end, the following features of SyncML will NOT be implemented until a later phase, even if this means that the library does not provide a conformant implementation:

• NOT supported: filtering of searches or synchronization targets.

• NOT supported: data split over multiple messages.

• NOT supported: soft-deletes.

• NOT supported: memory constraint management.

• NOT supported: suspend, resume and busy signaling.

• NOT supported: MD5 authentication scheme.

• NOT supported: per-database-layer authorization.

Installation

Installation of pysyncml is near-trivial with PIP:

$ pip install pysyncml

or, using easy_install:

$ easy_install pysyncml

Documentation

For downloaded packages, please see the generated documents in the “doc” directory, otherwise you can find links to the latest how-to and API reference documentation at pysyncml.