[Sugar-devel] Regarding JS collaboration project

[Prasoon Shukla]

Hi Sam. Sorry for the late response but I was occupied with academics.

Anyway, I need to bother you again with some questions.

So, I went through the thread by Emil Dudev and read the arguments he made
in favour of not using the mozilla node server and using telepathy instead.
To that, dnarvaez said that using the node server might be a better idea
since the current protocol is very unstable.

Now, I am somewhat familiar with sugar codebase but certainly not enough to
actually discuss the merits or demerits of either of these approaches
(although personally, I like better the idea of all communication happening
over websocket via a node server). So, the final decision on which approach
to take will be in the hands of those more experienced. But as I said
before, I would prefer it if we use the websocket protocol to have this
kind of architecture:

|Sugar Web Activity| <-----> |Sugar Shell|
   \
    \
 websocket
      \
|Node Server|
       /
      /
     /
|Sugar Web Activity| <-----> |Sugar Shell|

instead of the usual telepathy based communication. This I would like
because:
1. We'll be able to use the mozilla server with modifications as needed.
2. We'll be able to use the *huge* node.js ecosystem for realtime
communication in any way we want! And, websocket is very versatile -  we
can send pretty much any binary data over the network.

Also, I've worked with node before and found the communication to be quite
reliable (which it is not with the current XMPP based protocol, if I
understood dnarvaez correctly). That said, I've only tested out my node
based work with a handful of people, so...

The only downside is the need to have a node server running. For the case
when there is not internet connectivity, I think we can make a set of
scripts that can be called to run a node server on the one of the machines,
say that of the teacher, and all others will connect to it. And of course,
this process needs to be simple.

Anyway, it just seems right to me to augment JS activities with a JS based
collaboration framework. But of course, I don't really know the details all
too well to be making the decision here.

So, can you please comment on this? Once this decision is made, I can start
working on my application.

Thanks
ᐧ
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