libgdata

It's about time to announce something I've been working on for about three months now: libgdata. It's a GLib-, libsoup- and libxml2-based library for accessing GData APIs, as used by most Google services. There already exist several such libraries in a variety of languages, but as far as I'm aware this is the first one written in C — and thus the first which is widely accessible to the GNOME stack. So far it has decent support for YouTube video queries, and the beginnings of Google Calendar support.

Having ported the Totem YouTube plugin to use libgdata, my next plan is to port the evolution-data-server Google Calendar backend as well. With that done, libgdata will hopefully be stable and fully-featured enough for people to get to work on starting to fulfil Rob Bradford's dream of tighter desktop integration with web services.

6 thoughts on “libgdata

  1. Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

    Cool stuff! Any plans to make a youtube plugin for Rygel based on libgdata? 😉

  2. Ignacius

    I though Evolution was already using libgdata. At least it gets installed on my ubuntu when installing Evolution. Or is it another libgdata?

  3. Matthew Barnes

    That's great news! I'm looking forward to seeing the E-D-S backend ported. The Evolution team is short staffed these days and the more pieces we can outsource to actively maintained libraries, the better.

  4. Christian

    Imho GData is really misnamed. When reading "libgdata" in the title of the post I was thinking of something glibish whilest this should be GoogleData instead.

  5. Philip Withnall Post author

    Zeeshan: I hadn't got any immediate plans, but that's because I hadn't really thought about it. The libgdata YouTube query API is pretty much stable at the moment, so I'd be happy to help if you want to write such a plugin. I can't write one myself at the moment due to a lack of time. 🙁

    Ignacius: Evolution currently uses its own internal library which is also called "libgdata". My libgdata is meant to replace the Evolution one and provide a superset of its functionality.

    Michael: Last time I came across libgcal it looked unmaintained, but I see that there's now some activity around it (or I was wrong before). I'll have to talk to them.

    Christian: It is a little confusing, and plays hell with GtkBuilder's automatic constructor-function-from-class-name code, but I can't really change the name of Google's protocol.

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