[sugar] collaboration, technical means?

[Dan Williams]

On Sat, 2007-02-03 at 04:24 -0500, Ivan Krsti? wrote:
> 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.

Right.  At the very least, Sugar will provide a mechanism to find people
you want to collaborate with.  Sugar will also provide a 'bus' type
primitive that sends a message to everyone participating in your
activity.  You will also be able to grab the IP6 address of a buddy as
well.

But remember; any of the buddies in your activity might be reachable
through _either_ the school server, or on your local mesh link.  Buddies
participating in the activity will likely be a mix of both; so any
collaboration code will have to deal with both methods of talking to any
single buddy.  Sugar will provide an python API to do this easily (maybe
a C library later on), but if you don't use it you're on your own for
now.

Sugar may also provide a higher level API later on that isn't just
dumping a blob of data down a pipe to everyone.  Like Ivan mentions,
there are certainly ways to make the one-to-many communication easier,
and those have been discussed here before.

Dan

> 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.
>