[sugar] collaboration, technical means?

[Ivan Krstić]

Joshua N Pritikin wrote:
> Anyway, I was thinking about collaboration. I understand that at least 
> Abiword and TamTam have plans and maybe implementations for activity 
> specific collaboration. That's great. What I am worried about is apps 
> which are not tailored for Sugar. Is Sugar going to provide some sort of 
> fallback generic collaboration facilities?

I believe the plan is to provide not only fallback collaboration
facilities, but recommended ones. Abi will need to move to use the Sugar
presence service, and then do its raw communication over Jabber (the
AbiCollab design supports this already). This lets us do the right thing
when you're on the mesh and when you e.g. come in range of the school
server, or just connect to the net from somewhere.

My understanding is that there are two APIs in question here: one is
lower-level, whereby after interfacing with the presence service, you
can go on the wire and speak Jabber directly to implement your
collaboration logic, and another is a higher-level API which lets new
activities use Sugar collaboration primitives without having to roll
their own. Dan and Marco can correct me if I misunderstood this.

Andrew Clunis posted some ideas about the higher-level API on this list
a bit of time ago, and Alan Kay chimed in with a link to a PhD thesis
that provides a pretty compelling model for collaboration with
shared-state objects. That might eventually be the way to go.

-- 
Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D