[Sugar-devel] GSoC Groupthink Update: SharedTextDemo-5

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Martin Sevior wrote:
>> If you would like to add text sharing to your activity, I will gladly show
>> you the way.
>>
> 
> Or you could just embed libabiword through PyAbiWord , which is
> already deployed and allows full scale collaboration :-)
> 
> Sorry, I couldn't resist :-)

Yes, libabiword is far more mature and a featureful than Groupthink's
sharedtext.  I would certainly recommend pyabiword for most users.
However, Groupthink has a few distinct advantages as well.

1.  Groupthink provides a variety of shared data structures (not just
shared text). In fact, I intend to generalize the "shared text" to a
"shared list", which may happen to be a list of characters.
2.  Groupthink can do the sharing for you.  It provides a GroupActivity
class that implements all the ugly logic of acquiring, creating, and
joining shared channels.
3.  Groupthink can handle persistence for you.  It knows how to serialize
and deserialize its own data structures, and optionally interact with the
Journal.
4.  Groupthink is tolerant of network disruptions.  If the collaborating
group is broken by a network disconnection, collaboration will simply
proceed, and changes will be merged seamlessly as network conditions
improve.  This applies to all Groupthink data structures.
5.  Groupthink allows offline collaboration.  Users can work independently
on a shared document, and when they come together again, their changes
will be merged automatically.

I would very much enjoy a technical discussion about how we can improve
interoperability and integration between Groupthink and Pyabiword.

--Ben

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