[Sugar-devel] Collaboration support for sugar web activities

[Emil Dudev]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com>wrote:

> * Why did you go with a separate web activity instead on integrating
> directly in the shell?
>
Integrating it directly with the current neighborhood?
One problem would be of duplicates if a user is both on the telepathy
neighborhood and this 'new' one.
As mentioned in the earlier messages, I was thinking of writing a python
class that would act as the client between the sugar's mesh and the web
socket server.
I wasn't sure how exactly to handle regular activities and web activities
in such a 'merged' neighborhood.


> * Would it be possible to implement this without adding to apisocket and
> thus making it sugar specific?
>
Making web collaboration sugar specific, or not (being able to collaborate
from a normal browser)?
Since apisocket.py is the only way to communicate between the javascript
code and sugar, I'd say it won't be easy.
As noted above, it won't be very easy to have collaboration outside of
sugar, because the browser does not know where the activity page lies (if
it needs to join/open an activity).
It is possible to join a web activity, without changes to apisocket.py. The
problem would be that the current webkit page (sugar-net activity) would be
overwritten by the new activity (the one that is joined). There's no
problem from the web activity's point of view. The problem is that sugar
would still think that this is the sugar-net activity, and I'm not sure
what that would lead to. An other problem is that the sugar-net activity is
lost (it's page was reloaded into the joined activity).
A possible way to solve this is to open the new activity's page into a
separate tab. But then there are other problems: sugar would think the
sugar-net activity and it's new tab (the new activity) are one. Also, I'm
not sure how tab handling would look in webkit, without the top navigation
bars.

The questions don't seem to have simple answers...
When I'm writing the code, I'm not sure which way to go. I don't believe
that I can decide what is best for sugar. It would be nice to know what the
community is thinking and what is their vision of how web collaboration
should be handled.

Emil Dudev
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