[IAEP] [sugar] Narrative.

[Wade Brainerd]

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

> On 12 Oct 2008, at 01:48, Wade Brainerd wrote:
>
>  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'm sure I'm missing some obvious rainbow security issue here, but as an
> exercise in putting my foot in my mouth, could the Activity with the
> imbedded browse view not just access its files directly via file:// perhaps
> using some magic to give it the activities installed path location?


Oh yeah, that works fine!  If it's just static content, no need to subclass
anything or even start a webserver.   The sugar-webcontent-activity Activity
class could just be used directly with file:// URLs, the same way Content
bundles work now.

The WebServer class is needed in cases where there is something more complex
going on.  For example with our Wikipedia activity, each page request
involves decompressing Wikitext and dynamically rendering it to HTML.  There
is also a dynamically generated Search page for search queries, etc.
Ideally I'd like to see *that* code become part of sugar-webcontent-activity
as well so many Wikislice's could be created without duplicating the server
code.  It should be as simple as selecting your article list somehow,
creating an index page and an icon, and running some script to create a
brand new Wikislice activity (say Wikislice Sports etc).

Another example of needing the server would be if someone were to write some
kind of interactive testbook with builtin quizzes, that remembered your
answers in the journal.

Basically any kind of complex Web app that wants to run locally on the XO as
an Activity.

-Wade
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