Conduit is an open-source synchronization

File synchronization

File synchronization in computing is the process of ensuring that computer files in two or more locations are updated via certain rules....

 program for GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

. It allows the user to synchronize information

Information

Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...

 to and from various destinations. For instance, it can be used to synchronise photos on the users computer with various websites (such as Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

, Picasa and SmugMug

Smugmug

SmugMug is a paid digital photo sharing website.- History :Chris MacAskill and Don MacAskill started the original company to build a new video game-oriented web service in February 2002. By August 2002, though, their focus shifted...

). Other types of information may be synchronized, such as files, folders, RSS feeds

RSS

-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...

, email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

s, notes, contacts, calendars, and tasks. The program uses a drag-and-drop interface to give a visual representation of what is going to be done.

Goals

The developers of Conduit aim to provide a complete solution to keeping all of a user's information synchronized, regardless of where and how the data is stored. By creating a generic framework for synchronization, current problems with synchronization may be avoided where the tools are specific to a device/website/software and so the information can only be moved in a very restricted way.

How Conduit works

Conduit works by having a collection of data providers and data conversions. Data providers can represent all sorts of resources, such as an MP3 player attached to a computer, a website, or a program residing on a computer. They have data types, such as image, contact, or note, and are also defined to be either a source, a sink, or both. When the user tries to connect together a source data provider and a sink data provider, Conduit will try to allow this connection using the conversions it has available to it. Conduit uses a number of fundamental data types so that a conversion only has to be created once, and can be reused for any data providers that use that data type.

External links

• Conduit home page