This blog has been pretty quiet lately since I’ve been beavering hard on SyncTheMilk, my little Groovy app for syncing Outlook to Remember The Milk.
Sadly, though, SyncTheMilk will never make to 1.0, since the guys at RTM have released their own client called MilkSync which uses their own private SyncML interface. So it’s definitely time to call it a day. I came pretty close:
Anyways, I’ll leave 0.3 for download posterity. It was certainly a lot of fun to work on, and gave me a whole new perspective on how tricky the corner cases can be around syncing.
From a learning perspective I had a chance to put Groovy through its paces in the Business Domain and was really happy. Using Groovy greatly accelerated the XML/http stuff, and made the Outlook/COM integration easy. I also discovered some of the sync logic was probably better suited to a Java solution (I think Java’s static typing could have saved me a lot of time in there and saved me from a couple of hard to track down bugs where I was putting the wrong things into some of the collections).
From the Java side, I also had a chance to learn a little about SWT Progress Bars, Custom Field Editors, and Checkbox Listviewers.
Oh well… On to the next big idea… I’ve got a swag full of Grails ideas that are needing some attention… :-)