[sugar] activity sharing protocol

[Robert McQueen]

Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> I forgot an important question. Will all the communication have to go
> through tubes or we will allow activity authors to use just the presence
> service with their own communication stuff? (i.e. let the PS expose the
> buddies ip)

>From my perspective, not really. It's important to us that in Telepathy
we provide the right primitives that it's very easy to get an existing
TCP/whatever app (consider VNC via Telepathy or somesuch) working over
tubes. This would probably take the form of being able to get the CM to
expose the tube as a localhost TCP socket or Unix socket, and providing
convenient API to represent this to your app, eg GIOChannels in Glib,
whatever. In the long run the connection manager is going to get far
more clever at eg NAT traversal and stuff than your app will be.

For people who are writing an activity from scratch, I'd far rather
provide higher-level contructs like D-Bus messages, even using the
Python bindings to just have method/signal invocations, rather than
people having to invent their own wire protocols and
marshalling/serialisation etc.

> Marco

Regards,
Rob