[sugar] activity sharing protocol

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 14:10 +0000, Robert McQueen wrote:
> 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.

OK, we have been saying to activity authors that just getting ip/port
from the presence service would have worked so far. I guess we need to
reconsider.

I have two use cases in mind here:

1 Abiword collaboration
2 Develop activity using bazaar for code sharing.

About 1 I suppose maybe making abi collab use telepathy could be a win
for the desktop version too?;) 2 is more like a legacy issue...

I'd really like uwog and orospark to comment directly on this!

Marco