[Sugar-devel] Collaboration/Google wave

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>> Google announced Google Wave today: http://wave.google.com/
[...]
>> It would be very interesting to see how this might benefit Sugar; it
>> seems like the school server might run a local wave-protocol server to
>> allow very interesting collaboration between students.

I've written more about Waves and Sugar at:
http://cananian.livejournal.com/tag/google+wave

> It is very interesting, and looks like a fantastic piece of technical work
> (the back end should hold many wonderful collaboration conflict resolution
> tricks), but having watched the demo through a couple of times, it certainly
> fails hands down on the "would I try to show my Mum how to use this" (and
> yes she is a fairly active email web user).

I don't believe this to be the case at all; I expect initially users
experience it as email (the UI is identical to GMail, in broad
strokes), and learn additional capabilities gradually.  But in any
case, Sugar is not designed to be used by your mother. ;-)

If Sugar builds on Waves, users will experience it initially as a
"better Journal" (updated in real time, based on stuff that you *and*
your friends create) and a "better Write/Paint/Chat" (improved real
time collaboration, version tracking, real time translation, etc).  It
may not initially be obvious that all of the collaboration features
are built on the same foundation, or that you could use Write as a
replacement for Chat (indeed, as you already can today).  The Google
client UI would not be the same as the Sugar client UI, but they have
shown multiple client UIs already in the keynote demonstration
(including a text-only client), so making something that integrates
well with Sugar should not be a problem.

> Do you know if the protocol could work in a peer to peer local environment,
> or is it a server only solution?

Like XMPP it is a "client-server" framework, but only in the sense
that one machine of a group must be designated as a "server"; this
unique machine assumes the responsibility for ordering edits to result
in a canonical document.  The "server" could be a school server in a
classroom context, or an individual laptop in the "under a tree"
scenario.  You can duplicate a document across "servers" and federate
"servers" together.

Using a client-server framework makes the distributed computation
model *much* easier; most of our Sugar collaboration discussions have
assumed such a framework -- the trick is to be very flexible about who
is the "server" at a given time.
 --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )