[Sugar-devel] GSoC idea: Chart/graph-making activity

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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For the moment, I assume you are speaking of our current network
collaboration technologies.

Walter Bender wrote:
> Interesting idea. I don't see why this couldn't work; I am not sure of
> the security implications, but I don't see why collaboration always
> has to be between two identical activities.

Collaboration always has to be between two identical activities.  The only
exception is if the two activities, though not identical, speak a unified,
coherent network protocol.  In order for this to work, Activities would
have to specify their network protocol in complete detail, with each
change in the protocol generating a new version identifier.

It is not enough to specify the generic connection parameters, as done by
Telepathy; this only gets us far enough to fail.  The protocol in question
must specify the names, types, and meanings, of all remote procedures that
can be called from either side.  This is approximately the level of
specification required in something like an IETF RFC... and it would be
needed for every activity.  The versions would then need some sort of
identifier, so that the two participants can, when initializing a
connection, negotiate a mutually intelligible protocol (if one exists).

Achieving this level of precision specification is difficult even for
experienced full-time software engineers.  It is often performed by
specification specialists, who are experts in this field.

Moreover, distinct activities are _different_.  It should be obvious
enough that no matter how we twist the network protocols, Video Chat and
Write are never going to collaborate directly with each other.  Their
internal data structures are grossly incompatible, because their codebases
are unrelated, because their purposes are entirely distinct.

Now, the above is fairly obvious, so I suspect you are talking about
something else.  Perhaps you envision some way of taking the functionality
from one Activity and embedding it in another as a kind of widget, or
perhaps you're thinking of some other way of smushing activities together
like objects with well-defined interfaces.  If so, you may like to observe
the history of the Component Object Model [1], the Cross Platform
Component Object Model [2], or maybe even the GNU Network Object Model
Environment [3].

I think such "collaborative widgets" are very powerful; I've even written
one or two for Groupthink... but now I'm off into speculation, since I
don't really know what you're thinking about.

- --Ben

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpcom
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#Name
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