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

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 16:44, Benjamin M.
Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> 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.

Hmm, not sure how Pyabiword could use anything else than libabiword,
but what really excites me is seeing algorithmic improvements in both
abicollab and groupthink based on your joined experiences.

I have spoofed as well some conversations in #abiword about using
similar algorithms or even share some code when adding collaboration
capabilities to gnumeric. So this seems a good moment to rethink
already implemented stuff and merge approaches.

Martin and Marc have solved some interesting problems in text
collaboration and Ben has started a framework for adding collaboration
to generic data structures, based on our past experiences with
collaborative activities. Other GNOME apps are interested in gaining
collaboration, Marc is working on AbiCollab's Telepathy backend, Nokia
keeps pushing for Telepathy after the switch to Qt and several people
in the Sugar community are pushing for better integration of Qt apps.

I see a lot of synergy building up in this area, keep it up!

Regards,

Tomeu

> --Ben
>
>
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