[sugar] "Garden": A (currently hypothetical) Sugar library for sharing state between Activity participants

[Ian Bicking]

Ken Ritchie wrote:
> www.opencroquet.org (especially the TeaTime components)

I just read the "Croquet System Overview" section of this: 
http://www.opencroquet.org/Site%20PDFs/Croquet%20Programming%201.0B.pdf

It was a very nice overview of the architecture of the system.  I like 
the approach a lot; the description of the architecture makes me want to 
bang out code *right now*, which is always a good sign.  I'll try to 
resist actually doing so.

Whether this should be reimplemented in Python or implemented in a 
language-neutral way, I'm not sure.  I can kind of imagine the Router 
being a service accessible over dbus, but I'm not really sure what that 
would accomplish.  The dbus message format is also possibly something to 
use (since Croquet messages, I assume, are tied to Smalltalk).  But I 
don't know if that even matters -- there's nothing here that really 
facilitates inter-language communication, as it assumes that all Islands 
(aka objects) use exactly the same code.

I also wonder if there's room for more sloppy communication.  E.g., 
situations where out-of-order message execution is preferable to 
blocking.  If it damages the integrity of a simulation or 3D world, it 
might be preferable to just block.  OTOH, I think there are other kinds 
of collaboration where responsiveness may be more important than 
complete integrity.  It perhaps depends in part on how good the network 
connections are.  What will collaboration feel like over several hops on 
a mesh?  What about over a satellite internet connection?  I have no 
idea how this will effect the experience.  And perhaps good message 
design can help with this anyway.  For instance, if you are editing text 
you don't necessarily want to send a message for every keystroke; the UI 
can batch things up and resolve conflicts, even if the underlying 
objects are less forgiving.  So maybe I'm imagining the problem.

-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org