[Sugar-devel] Thoughts on Collab

[Lionel Laské]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for your feedback.

You're right for the serverless collaboration, it's something I would like
to integrate too in Sugarizer.
Unfortunately the web nature of Sugarizer force me to don't rely on client
side technology out of the browser.
And currently, there is no technology (neither websockets, neither webRTC,
...) that allow peer-to-peer communication between browsers.
Hopefully one day. Some guys at Mozilla proposed some beta implementation.

Regarding your idea to resume private activity from the server, I've solved
the issue differently.
The Journal view show three different views (see at the bottom of the
Journal page): the local one (content store in the browser), the private
cloud (content store on the server but viewable only by the user), the
shared cloud (content store on the server but viewable by any user
connected to the server). You could test it yourself or see a short video
of this features here [1].

Best regards.

        Lionel.

[1]
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1zypes_sugarizer-server-features_school



2016-07-24 12:15 GMT+02:00 Sam Parkinson <sam.parkinson3 at gmail.com>:

> Hi Lionel,
>
> I like the experience that you have made with Sugarizer collab.  It is
> very smooth!
>
> I think that Sugar would probably do a few things differently though.  I
> want to support serverless collaboration.  I have a few reasons for this:
>
> *  Some friends go to the library after school to work on their
> assignment.  They both connect to the library wifi.  Because they are on
> the same wifi, they see each other highlighted in the neighbourhood view.
> They collaborate over LAN, giving them a significantly more snappy
> experience.
> *  The reduced latency also suppresses most of the edge cases in the
> application that would have resulted in the documents getting out of sync.
> *  A group of teachers from a collection of schools (sometimes called a
> "network") meet up for PL/PD.  Collab just works, even though they are from
> different schools (which have different servers)
>
> Do they seem reasonable?
>
> Going a bit more in the weeds, I would probably make 1 change to the
> neighboured model, compared to you great implementation!  My plan is that
> every activity, public and private is boradcast on the server.  All
> broadcast activities share their "activity_id", but only the public
> activities also share their title, type and description.  This would let us
> make the "resume shared activity" feature work; resuming an activity now
> becomes checking if the activity is broadcast then either joining the
> broadcast activity or just resuming it normally.  I think this is the type
> of experience users expect after things like google docs.
>
> Thanks,
> Sam
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 6:09 PM, Lionel Laské <lionel.laske at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Sam,
>
> I suggest you to have a look on Sugarizer Server.
> Features 1) and 2) are already implemented and could be used into several
> Sugarizer activities (Chat, Paint, Memory, ...). Plus the Sugarizer Server
> is already include in XSCE, thanks to Tim.
> You could test the implementation here [1] (use 2 browsers to test it) and
> see more information on Server implementation here [2]. Finally most of the
> code, based on Web Socket, is here [3][4].
>
> Best regards from France.
>
>           Lionel.
>
> [1] http://server.sugarizer.org
> [2] https://github.com/llaske/Sugarizer#server
> [3] https://github.com/llaske/sugarizer/blob/master/server/presence.js
> [4]
> https://github.com/llaske/sugarizer/blob/master/lib/sugar-web/presence.js
>
> 2016-07-24 2:36 GMT+02:00 <sugar-devel-request at lists.sugarlabs.org>:
>
>> Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 10:36:00 +1000
>> From: sam at sam.today
>> To: Sugar-dev Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>, Abhijit Patel
>>         <abhisandhyasp.ap at gmail.com>
>> Subject: [Sugar-devel] Thoughts on Collab
>> Message-ID: <1469320560.1907.0 at smtp.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> In the irc meeting 2 nights ago, we discussed adding collaberation to
>> the journal project feature.  Abhijit has spent around 3 weeks working
>> on it.  But we can't even get a text channel between the participants.
>> Telepathy is painful, buggy (we have a segfault in salut) and hard to
>> debug.  It is also unmaintained - the last commit to telepathy salut
>> and gabble was 2 years ago.
>>
>> So this is the pre-text for an experiment; modernising the
>> collaboration stack without using telepathy.
>>
>> Initially, I proposed Matrix.Org.  I don't support this idea any more,
>> as matrix.org has some very messaging specific features, and some spots
>> where sugar would not fit idiomatically within the api.
>>
>> So I have been thinking a little more about splitting up the problem
>> into 3 sections:
>>
>> 1)  A neighbourhood view implementation - a model to discover people
>> nearby or via the school server
>> 2)  A group messaging socket - the backbone for collaboration in
>> activities
>> 3)  A one-to-one file transfer mechanism - used for initial state sync
>> in activities, "send to" feature in journal, etc
>>
>> I have think that we can do the neighbourhood view by using 2 backends
>> and merging the result.  We can use the Avahi api to publish/find
>> activities/buddies on the local network.  We could additionally use a
>> school server (running a custom sugar server app) to support buddies
>> who are not on the same network.  Since both activities and buddies
>> have unique identifiers, we can easily have both back-ends running at
>> the same time, and de-duplicate the result.
>>
>> Avahi is very fun to work with:
>>
>>     avahi-publish-service "Sam P" "_org_sugarlabs_collab_user._tcp"
>> 8080 "name=Sam P" "color=#fff,#000" "other_metadata=other_value"
>>     avahi-discover
>>
>> All of the backends could give us an ip and a port to reach the other
>> person.  For the avahi backend, this would be a direct connection to
>> the other buddy.  For the schoolserver, it would be proxied through the
>> schoolserver.
>>
>> I'd love to hear your thoughts on the other problems, and on this
>> problem to.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Sam
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