<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> <style type="text/css">#toc, .toc, .mw-warning { border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); padding: 5px; font-size: 95%; }#toc h2, .toc h2 { display: inline; border: medium none; padding: 0pt; font-size: 100%; font-weight: bold; }#toc #toctitle, .toc #toctitle, #toc .toctitle, .toc .toctitle { text-align: center; }#toc ul, .toc ul { list-style-type: none; list-style-image: none; margin-left: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; text-align: left; }#toc ul ul, .toc ul ul { margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 2em; }#toc .toctoggle, .toc .toctoggle { font-size: 94%; }body { font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); widows: 2; font-style: normal; text-indent: 0in; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; font-size: 12pt; }table { }td { border-collapse: collapse; text-align: left; vertical-align: top; }p, h1, h2, h3, li { color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; text-align: left; }</style> <div> "The most important part of a christmas gift is the packaging." - My father-in-law (acording to my wife) Dextrose Activity Pack As maybe you know, we started giving some maintenance to a collection of activities - the Dextrose Activity Pack. These activities will come with Dextrose but you will also be able to download them as a pack. My plan is you will be able to download an activity catalogue. Think of "Add & Remove Activities" like in Ubuntu, except activity bundles may come precached so that you can download an entire "Activity Pack" into USB or otherwise distribute offline or online as a single download. Currently ASLO, Sugar Labs's Activity Library does not cover this. Obtaining/updating several activities at once over a slow link is a pain. Deployments could use this mechanism to distribute new activities / updates. The Catalogue Looking at the catalogue, I think it should be visually attractive, have screenshots, authors, a description. It could even offer a way to provide feedback for each activity and/or interact with other users. In order to provide an interesting package system for deployers and end users, I think I need to focus on building this Catalogue, make it really nice and user friendly. The Sugar WebSDK I've decided to develop a framework for the approach I'm taking with the Catalogue. The pattern is known as Model-View-Controller and is widely used in web industry and other places [0]. In short, we provide a View layer that is powered by Webkit. This layer is connected thru events with the Controller layer, which is implemented in Python. The Controller interacts with the Model, also in Python, the layer which handles data. In turn, the View may be updated. Javascript will also be available. The good part is that all the components are already there. I've been doing research and I found Python Webkit DOM Bindings [1]. The point of Sugar WebSDK is not making Web .xo bundles, but implementing the GUI part of the activity (except for sugar toolbars) as a Webkit window, effectively turning it into a GUI toolkit engine. A similar approach was taken by "Titanium Appcelerator Desktop SDK" [2] which powers the Status.Net Desktop client [3]. I believe the ability to effectively make attractive interfaces in PyGTK is pretty scarce. Doing so is also very time consuming. OTOH there is a huge, mature offering of talented web designers out there. Embedded javascript might allow for interesting visual tricks like jquery's fade effects, or even full HTML5 gadgets/widgets. I expect the Activity ecosystem can make good use of a framework which allows to distribute the production of an Activity among a team that can include traditional HTML/CSS designers. I know we can. I intent to make this WebSDK a Sugar Labs project. This framework will be shared to the developer community with a tutorial and of course, will be used to build the Activity Pack Catalogue. RoadMap <ul> <li>Initial Hello World of Sugar WebSDK - Beginning of July</li> <li>Interface Design of Activity Pack Catalogue - July</li> <li>Implementation of Catalogue functionality - August</li> </ul> This would be enough for a first "beta" release. Focus after that should be on polish and documentation for a release of both the WebSDK and the Activity Pack Catalogue. Help appreciated Currently I'm done with researching and ready to implement. If I missed something it'd be nice to know, as well as general feedback on the WebSDK idea. I especially appreciate prior experience and gotchas that may save me time. Open questions remain with the back-end package functionality: How it all interacts with ASLO and the Sugar update mechanism. I'm inspired partly by some insights Lucian had with Webified. Also Alsroot, with the brilliant sweets project. My impression: ASLO+ project and Sweets packaging system could probably be the backend medium term. An implementation reusing Anish's metadata updater code is probably the lowest hanging fruit. Sincerely, Sebastian Somos Azucar Activity Central Activity Team [0] - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_View_Controller">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_View_Controller</a> [1] - <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/pythonwebkit/">http://www.gnu.org/software/pythonwebkit/</a> [2] - <a href="http://developer.appcelerator.com/doc/desktop/python">http://developer.appcelerator.com/doc/desktop/python</a> [3] - <a href="http://status.net/desktop">http://status.net/desktop</a><a href="http://wiki.appcelerator.org/display/guides/Getting+Started+with+Titanium#GettingStartedwithTitanium-TitaniumDesktopSDK"></a> </div> </body> </html>