[Sugar-devel] HTML activities

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 5:30 PM, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
> Hey Daniel,
>
> thanks for the writeup!
>
>
> On 01/26/2013 03:27 PM, Daniel Narvaez wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> the desire to be able to write activities using html has been expressed
>> several
>> times by developers. We have seen several approaches but there is not much
>> support for it in the core platform yet.
>>
>> I and Simon have been trying to figure out how to best integrate this with
>> the
>> existing platform. Bits of code can be pulled from the sugar-build html
>> branch.
>> We don't have much of a demo yet, but I think the basic pieces of the
>> infrastucture are becoming clear, so I thought it would be good to try and
>> summarize them in an email to the list.
>>
>> 1 sugar-toolkit-html
>>
>> * A new module.
>> * Independent from the native sugar API, so that html activities might be
>> run
>>    on other platforms, like Android or even inside a web browser.
>> * HTML equivalents of the gtk widgets. For example Toolbar and Palette.
>> * Per-platform (sugar-os, android, web-browser...) implementations of the
>>    same javascript interface to the sugar services. For example it might
>>    provide a datastore.save(metadata, file) method or an
>>    icon.get_with_colors(xo_colors)
>>
>> 2 sugar-http-server
>>
>> * A sugar-os internal component. Other platforms might implement the
>>    html/javascript API without even using an http server.
>> * Implemented by the sugar-toolkit-html module but managed by the sugar
>> shell.
>> * Serves the activity bundles content with something like
>>    http://localhost:8000/org.sugarlabs.HTMLDemo/index.html.
>> * Exposes the sugar services API with json methods like
>>    http://localhost:8000/org.sugarlabs.HTMLDemo/datastore/save
>
>
> As we talked about today, I was looking at node-dbus [1] in order to talk to
> the DS over dbus from java script. Looks straight forward. I installed the
> module (npm install node-dbus) and did a quick example based on the test in
> the repo to listen on the 'Created' signal from the DS. Works fine.
>
> Of course, if we use nodejs we have to handle the modules packaging as
> nodejs itself is rather limited and a most of the functionality is in the
> modules.

There's 100s of them currently being packaged for Fedora, there's
about 50 in F-18 already, I think a lot more (maybe it just seems that
way from the build reports) in F-19.

"yum list nodejs*" will give you more details.

Peter