[sugar] collaboration, technical means?

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 19:55 +0100, J.M. Maurer wrote:
> 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.
> 
> Why not default to plain TCP if possible? It's a lot less resource heavy
> than XMPP. As for integrating with buddies connected to some school
> server over XMPP while you are doing some collaboration over TCP
> already: abiword will be able to set up collaboration sessions of people
> using different transports just fine.

The reason to use XMPP is to talk to a school server.  In the Abiword
case, it's probably not horrible to open 5 TCP connections to each of
the 5 people you are writing with.  I'm not sure there's a case to be
made for more than a few people writing the same document, at least not
now.

But that's specific to Abiword.

To achieve some level of scalability, and due to mesh oddities, lots of
the communication will be laptop1 -> server ->
[laptop2,laptop3,laptop4], so that each of 50 people don't have to open
49 TCP connections to everyone else.  It will be 1 TCP connection to the
server, which will then relay everything sent to it to everyone
participating in the channel.  Think of it like IRC or XMPP
multi-user-chat, just that we'll be sending base64 or something rather
than plaintext.

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.
> 
> Sounds good to me. We will use the first, low level API.
> 
> Marc
> 
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