[IAEP] [sugar] Narrative.

[Wade Brainerd]

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

> 1) Content bundles are distributed and installed into the default home
> page library. No way to manage these in Sugar once installed (have to
> drop to a command line and know what you're doing).
>
> 2) Content is being shipped in an Activity build from a minimal Browse
> template (hopefully sharing as much code as possible). The Wikipedia
> slice and Help are examples in this direction. They can be managed
> within the current Sugar GUI, just like any activity. They are also
> visible (or can be) from the home view. They allow custom icons for
> the content to be accessed. They allow customisations via the Activity
> interface to improve access to information in a Sugar HIG way.


I'm the one who did the activity part of the Wikipedia slice, which extends
Browse.  It was based on one of mstone's older projects.

On the good side, the Wikipedia example imports 99% of its code directly
from Browse, adds a Search toolbar, starts up a webserver, and goes to a
URL.  Quite simple, really.

On the bad side, you can't run two Wikipedias because they will try to bind
webservers to the same port.  Also, if the user removes Browse, Wikipedia
will no longer run.

These issues could best be solved by a sugar-webcontent-activity package
which is shipped by default.  It would contain the Browse GUI classes plus a
template Activity class.  It would also provide a base WebServer class that
takes care of finding an unused port and binding to localhost.  Content
bundles could use the template Activity class as is without any Python code,
or else could subclass it (and optionally the WebServer class as well).

I agree with you that right now, Activity Bundles are a better way to
distribute content than the Library bundles.  There is a lot of
infrastructure and UI built around activity management now.  Activities are
also more visisble - good content is currently too well hidden inside
Browse.  I think it would be a nice simplification to the Sugar environment.

-Wade
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