Re: Some thoughts on MobileOrg and its development ....

[Samuel Loury <konubinix@gmail.com>]

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Samuel Loury <konubinix@gmail.com> writes:

> I have been using the XML-RPC trac plugin³ for a while now and I made we
> wonder if we could reproduce this in the scope of mobile org. With an
> RPC interface, one would be free to create their own interface easily
> (at least python xml-rpc library is really easy to manipulate) and an
> official interface could emerge from that.
I have made a some research on the net and found epc¹. This library
appears to do exactly what I am looking for: a remote procedure call
mechanism in emacs.

For what I have tried so far, it looks very promising.

To install the python side, just run:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
pip install epc
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

To install the emacs server part, it is a bit trickier since elpa ships
only the client part. It was not so hard though.  I installed deferred²,
ctable³ and epc⁴. Then I could launch the emacs rpc server.

For the time being, I only tried exporting the org agenda files. And it
was really easy.

The server code (in emacs) looks like:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(require 'cl)
(require 'epcs)

(defvar pyepc-epcs
  (epcs:server-start
   (lambda (mngr)
     (lexical-let ((mngr mngr))
       (epc:define-method mngr 'org-agenda-files 'org-agenda-files)
       )
     )
   9998
   )
  )
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

The client code (in python) looks like:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
From epc.client import EPCClient
client = EPCClient(("localhost", 9998), log_traceback=True)
print str(client.methods_sync())
print str(client.call_sync('org-agenda-files', []))
client.close()
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

In conclusion, the communication between emacs and python is very
easy. The difficult part now, is to re-factorise the emacs org-mode code
that creates the agenda so that it may provide a data structure
representing the information. I have only had a quick look, but it does
not look straight.

I think it is not much work to get a workable emacs on android⁵ and I
honestly don't know on iPhone.

Once it is done, it would be hopefully easy to configure emacs to run
the epcs code and use anything python based to communicate with it. I
will probably use sl4a⁶ since it is totally awesome.

The aspect I like about the design I propose is that the core (emacs +
epcs) is loosely coupled with the interface. This way, anyone would be
free to provide their one.

What do you think about this project. Do you think it could work? I
think I will eventually start it anyway (just to see). Off course, since
I am also a busy person, it would probably slow, but I honestly think it
would be worth it. Anyone would like to contribute?

Thanks for reading.

¹ http://python-epc.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
² https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-deferred.git
³ https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-ctable.git
⁴ https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-epc.git
⁵ http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/77698
⁶ https://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
--
Konubinix
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