A universal backend (not a J-Lo joke)

I've started to keep track of my own (as in, not work) projects in kplato. In general, as a project scheduler it seems to compare really well with the other software of its kind of used and of course integrates nicely with the environment. There are a couple of usability issues for the way I seem to want to use it, but nothing earth shaking. Were I a better person, I'd have made notes and passed them... I'll have to try and remember to do that next time I set up a new project.

Also, like most examples of this kind of software, they provide way more features by default than I use on a small to mid-size project, especially one where I'm my own boss and I don't really care about or can't really use features like multiple resources working set hours a week at such-and-such an hourly rate. I'm really just using it for a nice tree structured TODO list in some respects, with the ability to record when things are completed. It would suit the way I use it at present to be able to have a new project template that started a default project with the just the bare minimum of fields displayed and little to no resource monitoring. Kplato supports templates, so I'm sure something like this is probably quite possible.

Anyways, what this got me thinking about was two things really. One, it would be cool to have a multi-user version where the data is all stored centrally and clients connect, read from and write to that central copy, have access to a global resource list so that resource allocation for an entire work group could be calculated and reported across all the existing projects and inter-project linking could be more powerful.

The other thing that this got me thinking about was: it would be cool to have a global backend for applications that commonly store numerous versions of their documents. You could define an API that any application that wanted to could use to write data off to a global store. The API could support a number of operations like storing diffs, time stamping, encrypting and all the other things that storing versioned data requires as well as offering a bunch of other cool things:

• It could use pluggable backends so any given user scenario, hardware combination and storage technology available could be used. For example, it could support flat files, SQL databases, existing version control systems like subversion or even file systems like ZFS.
• It could also provide a pluggable interface for compression and encryption. As new technologies come along that provide better / faster / sexier compression or as crypto systems get defeated, new versions could be plugged in
• You could do cool time machine stuff like a certain fruit moniker-ed company's OS
• You could have a backup daemon that could, again, support plug-ins for different archiving methods
• It could automatically generate nepomuk data
• You could have a KIO slave provided file system style access to your documents
• As well as integration into content generation and manipulation applications, programs like dolphin and konqueror could let you browse your archives.

Applications that this would automatically be cool for would be all of koffice, digikam and gwenview, kdevelop, kate and all the content creators and editors in KDE in general.

Applications that might not be as obvious but could also be interesting include network communications tools like kopete and konversation. For applications like these, it wouldn't be so much be about keeping version data as once it's on the internet there probably isn't as much use in reviewing version history as their might be for a word processor document for example, but it would be good to be able to have chronological browsing.