Testing upon Public SyncML Services

During the development of SyncMLDotNet before SyncML Client for Open Contacts v1.0 Beta, I tested the SyncMLDotNet upon a locally installed Funambol server v6.x, and later ScheduleWorld.com which was based on Funambol v5.x.

After SyncML Client for Open Contacts v1.0.1 was released, I thought it would be good see whether the SyncML client can talk well with other public SyncML Services. As expected, my.funambol.com is working quite good. However, testing upon the following SyncML services, disclosed that many of them were quite buggy, not conforming basic requirements of SyncML specifications, or at lease, some of these service were not friendly to workstation based sync clients.

• sync.zyb.com ( ZYB HTTP SyncML Server v3.8.4)
• sync.goosync.com (SyncWiseEnterprise v3.0.3 Beta)
• sync.o-sync.com (not reviewed in returned message)
  

As Funambol's Outlook Plug-in based on the Funambol's Client API Native C++ is considered as being mature, I used the plug-in to do cross-checking which revealed the same problems.

For more detail, please read the bug report, as Blogger.com could not handle html/xml tags properly.


Summary
While these 3 web services focused on mobile devices, the implementations were buggy to workstation based sync clients. I would guess that mobile devices require less communication overheads and less validations, this was why the programmers of these SyncML servers could not find the bugs.

So, I consider that Funambol is the best implementation of SyncML server in the marketing regarding to conformation to SyncML, reliability and price.