[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] copy files to/from server

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Martin Abente
<martin.abente.lahaye at gmail.com> wrote:
> I still didn't make up my mind about which technical approach should I
> take in order to get this working, but I guess people already started
> sharing some ideas. And I would appreciate more ideas and discussion
> before I get to that point.

ok - some notes from me on this topic

For file management, I very strongly recommend using WebDAV. It is a
bit less efficient than "real" network file system protocols, but the
benefits are many:
   - more flexibilty
   - closer to you and me in the stack - you can easily find WebDAV
toolkits in HLLs that allow you to expose your data as files and
directories over WebDAV, as well as client implementations
   - it deals reasonably gracefully with intermittent connectivity
(SMB/CIFS, NFS, etc get you nasty system freezes if the server
disappears)
   - wide range of (fairly well behaved) client and server implementations
   - a good test suite for the server side
   - On the XS side... Moodle has a WebDAV implementation and Apache
has one too.

>From the department of optimizations to keep in mind early (but
implement late...) -- if ds-backup is working correctly, you'll have
most of the content already on the XS. Might be a nice optimisation to
skip transferring it -- if you have a msg exchange *before* the WebDAV
(or other) file transfer.

> The very basic requirement is: each children must have its private
> "cloud volume", where they can drop their files in the same way they
> interact with physical external storage devices.

Why would I drop the file there? In my understanding, what you want to
do with it is *publish* it.

> On top of that we can do a lot of things that might be very useful for
> teachers daily in the classrooms.

Yeah - *publish it to my classroom group* -- via Moodle. I've worked
for ~10 years with teachers and that's what they want to do 99.9% of
the time -- publish it to the group. If we do that nicely, we're
golden.

cheers,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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