[Sugar-devel] Turtle Art on Activities.sugarlabs.org

[James Simmons]

David,

Much of what you describe is similar to what I do in Get Internet
Archive Books.  I use the Internet Archive's advanced search form and
make a fat client in Python to work with it.  The big advantage of
using this rather than just the website is that searching is easier in
my client, and when you download a book using my client I put metadata
and a nice meaningful title in the Journal entry, whereas if you just
download the file from the website you get an ugly file name and its
URL as the Journal title.

If I was doing this (don't get the idea I'm volunteering!) I'd have a
similar client Activity that works in both directions plus a server
component (Java servlet, PHP, whatever).  For uploads I'd do a
multipart form post with the fields corresponding to metadata in the
Journal plus the file contained in the Journal.  In that way you could
easily send all the Journal information to a data store on the server,
including buddy name and colors, title, description, MIME type, etc.

The user in upload mode would see a Journal list not unlike the one
View Slides uses for images, except it would be limited to those
Journal types the Activity would support uploading to the server.

For searching and downloading it would work pretty much like Get
Internet Archive Books does now, but instead of creating Journal
entries with a MIME type it would put the Activity ID in there so the
downloaded entries could be resumed using Turtle Art or whatever it
was that had created them.

I think this would work a bit better than using ASLO because you could
preserve all the metadata this way.

James Simmons


> Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:08:41 -0600
> From: David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Sugar-devel] Turtle Art on Activities.sugarlabs.org
> To: sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org, systems
>        <systems at lists.sugarlabs.org>,  iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <393f20981002251008q312eb13cwaa1b9cbedf2287bd at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> The other day during an infrastructure meeting, Walter brought up some
> thought on how to enable kids to exchange Turtle Art projects....
>
> Alsroot has been thinking about how to do this through a.sl.o since he
> became the activities.sugarlabs.org code maintainer.
>
> The high level view is that someone can easily upload Turtle Art creations
> to somewhere and then they, or others, can go to a portal to download other
> Turtle Art creations.
>
> Client side, this would require:
> 1. Adding a widget to either the journal or the TA activity to upload the TA
> Bundle.
> 2. Adding a TA bundle installer to handler TA Bundle downloads.
>
> Server side, this would require:
> 1. A place to accept TA bundle uploads.
> 2. A search-able place from which to download TA bundles