Collaborative Activity Development
(Excuse the cross-post, but I don't know whether activity authors are on the sugar list, which I presume is the more appropriate list for this topic in future...) I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration. If you are developing an activity and have/intend to implement collaboration, my mission is to make that easier through documentation, examples, improved API and general assistance. Please take a look at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collaboration_Central - a work in progress but it's intended to be a one-stop shop for information on implementing and improving collaboration. This week's Sugar development meeting on IRC (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_dev_meeting#Thursday_April_17_2008_-_17.00_.28UTC.29) will focus on activity collaboration. If you have questions or comments I'd love to discuss them then. Otherwise, catch me on #sugar, or if you have issues that would benefit other activity authors, please send them to the sugar list and we can discuss them there. Regards Morgan ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Collaborative Activity Development
Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration. This is great! The best thing OLPC could do to improve activity collaboration is to get it working for ordinary programs -- running on the X Window System, or on MacOSX, or Windows. Why doesn't AbiWord already collaborate with Write? Why doesn't Firefox collaborate with Browse? It's the same code base. Tying collaboration to Sugar is a losing strategy. Once the rest of the world figures out that *their* programs should be trivial to collaborate in too, they'll reimplement collaboration (likely in an incompatible way). Then Sugar's collaboration will be an orphan rather than the mainstream. Instead, if OLPC's collaboration code supported cross-platform collaboration, OLPC's model and its implementing code would spread throughout the whole computing infrastructure. And that would bring in a new pile of contributors, enhancing, debugging, and porting it everywhere. Easy collaboration is one of OLPC's key advantages over its competition. Making that a reality for all the kids (and adults) in the world requires a broader vision. Merely debugging what makes Sugar apps fail to collaborate under load, or getting a few more Sugar authors to add collaboration, won't suffice. John PS: If there is a simple way to install a couple of RPM's or DEB's, add a paragraph of code and a few automake macros, and add collaboration to any program written in C or C++, then please document it! (If on the other hand it only works in Python and requires sugar-jhbuild then there's some work to be done.) PPS: This review of AbiWord says: http://www.linux.com/feature/131852 The new AbiWord supposedly offers real-time document collaboration developed for the OLPC project and implemented by means of an experimental plugin. As per the AbiWord-2.6 release notes, there are three implementations of the plugin, one for the OLPC, and two (an XMPP-based one and a pure TCP/IP one) for Linux. The Linux plugins compiled without any issues, but AbiWord couldn't activate them. The plugin isn't currently available for Windows. [abiword.com says the Windows plugin is available on 2.6.2 now. But I never did find the collab plugin, nor any documentation for it. The 2.6.0 release notes imply that the three available collab plugins can't actually interoperate with each other!] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Collaborative Activity Development
yes, this looks like a great start! I'm just getting my feet wet with development (got sugar-jhbuild working today! ;), and was wondering if anyone has had experience, or examples, of software on regular laptop collaborating with an XO? Is this even possible, and if it isn't then is there a way I can help make it happen? It would be great for me (and others!) if I could develop a mac or linux version of an activity and have them talk to its sister app on some XOs Bobby On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:02 PM, John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration. This is great! The best thing OLPC could do to improve activity collaboration is to get it working for ordinary programs -- running on the X Window System, or on MacOSX, or Windows. Why doesn't AbiWord already collaborate with Write? Why doesn't Firefox collaborate with Browse? It's the same code base. Tying collaboration to Sugar is a losing strategy. Once the rest of the world figures out that *their* programs should be trivial to collaborate in too, they'll reimplement collaboration (likely in an incompatible way). Then Sugar's collaboration will be an orphan rather than the mainstream. Instead, if OLPC's collaboration code supported cross-platform collaboration, OLPC's model and its implementing code would spread throughout the whole computing infrastructure. And that would bring in a new pile of contributors, enhancing, debugging, and porting it everywhere. Easy collaboration is one of OLPC's key advantages over its competition. Making that a reality for all the kids (and adults) in the world requires a broader vision. Merely debugging what makes Sugar apps fail to collaborate under load, or getting a few more Sugar authors to add collaboration, won't suffice. John PS: If there is a simple way to install a couple of RPM's or DEB's, add a paragraph of code and a few automake macros, and add collaboration to any program written in C or C++, then please document it! (If on the other hand it only works in Python and requires sugar-jhbuild then there's some work to be done.) PPS: This review of AbiWord says: http://www.linux.com/feature/131852 The new AbiWord supposedly offers real-time document collaboration developed for the OLPC project and implemented by means of an experimental plugin. As per the AbiWord-2.6 release notes, there are three implementations of the plugin, one for the OLPC, and two (an XMPP-based one and a pure TCP/IP one) for Linux. The Linux plugins compiled without any issues, but AbiWord couldn't activate them. The plugin isn't currently available for Windows. [abiword.com says the Windows plugin is available on 2.6.2 now. But I never did find the collab plugin, nor any documentation for it. The 2.6.0 release notes imply that the three available collab plugins can't actually interoperate with each other!] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Collaborative Activity Development
John, We really would like to get the Sugar UI components running on vanilla Linux desktops, and the apps all interoperating Help greatfully appreciated... - Jim On Mon, 2008-04-14 at 13:02 -0700, John Gilmore wrote: Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration. This is great! The best thing OLPC could do to improve activity collaboration is to get it working for ordinary programs -- running on the X Window System, or on MacOSX, or Windows. Why doesn't AbiWord already collaborate with Write? Why doesn't Firefox collaborate with Browse? It's the same code base. Tying collaboration to Sugar is a losing strategy. Once the rest of the world figures out that *their* programs should be trivial to collaborate in too, they'll reimplement collaboration (likely in an incompatible way). Then Sugar's collaboration will be an orphan rather than the mainstream. Instead, if OLPC's collaboration code supported cross-platform collaboration, OLPC's model and its implementing code would spread throughout the whole computing infrastructure. And that would bring in a new pile of contributors, enhancing, debugging, and porting it everywhere. Easy collaboration is one of OLPC's key advantages over its competition. Making that a reality for all the kids (and adults) in the world requires a broader vision. Merely debugging what makes Sugar apps fail to collaborate under load, or getting a few more Sugar authors to add collaboration, won't suffice. John PS: If there is a simple way to install a couple of RPM's or DEB's, add a paragraph of code and a few automake macros, and add collaboration to any program written in C or C++, then please document it! (If on the other hand it only works in Python and requires sugar-jhbuild then there's some work to be done.) PPS: This review of AbiWord says: http://www.linux.com/feature/131852 The new AbiWord supposedly offers real-time document collaboration developed for the OLPC project and implemented by means of an experimental plugin. As per the AbiWord-2.6 release notes, there are three implementations of the plugin, one for the OLPC, and two (an XMPP-based one and a pure TCP/IP one) for Linux. The Linux plugins compiled without any issues, but AbiWord couldn't activate them. The plugin isn't currently available for Windows. [abiword.com says the Windows plugin is available on 2.6.2 now. But I never did find the collab plugin, nor any documentation for it. The 2.6.0 release notes imply that the three available collab plugins can't actually interoperate with each other!] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Collaborative Activity Development
Ar 14/04/2008 am 13:02, ysgrifennodd John Gilmore: Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration. Tying collaboration to Sugar is a losing strategy. Once the rest of the world figures out that *their* programs should be trivial to collaborate in too, they'll reimplement collaboration (likely in an incompatible way). Then Sugar's collaboration will be an orphan rather than the mainstream. Instead, if OLPC's collaboration code supported cross-platform collaboration, OLPC's model and its implementing code would spread throughout the whole computing infrastructure. And that would bring in a new pile of contributors, enhancing, debugging, and porting it everywhere. I absolutely agree. While most of the OLPC collaboration code will happily work outside Sugar, there are interoperability problems, and I'm not sure what we should do about some of them. I think perhaps we made a mistake in focusing on designing a good API rather than protocols that would be general and easy to reimplement (specifically, I think the discovery protocols are maybe not general enough, and the data transport protocols are maybe too hard to reimplement). That said, I and a number of other people are working on popularising the collaboration software that Collabora developed for Sugar outside Sugar. PS: If there is a simple way to install a couple of RPM's or DEB's, add a paragraph of code and a few automake macros, and add collaboration to any program written in C or C++, then please document it! (If on the other hand it only works in Python and requires sugar-jhbuild then there's some work to be done.) It's not limited to Python, and doesn't require sugar-jhbuild, but our APIs are too complicated. I'm hoping that we can adopt things in the vein of Ben Schwartz's work to provide nice ways for developers to make their applications collaborative. Ideas about how to make our collaboration technology more general and accessible are welcome. PPS: This review of AbiWord says: http://www.linux.com/feature/131852 The new AbiWord supposedly offers real-time document collaboration developed for the OLPC project and implemented by means of an experimental plugin. As per the AbiWord-2.6 release notes, there are three implementations of the plugin, one for the OLPC, and two (an XMPP-based one and a pure TCP/IP one) for Linux. The Linux plugins compiled without any issues, but AbiWord couldn't activate them. The plugin isn't currently available for Windows. [abiword.com says the Windows plugin is available on 2.6.2 now. But I never did find the collab plugin, nor any documentation for it. The 2.6.0 release notes imply that the three available collab plugins can't actually interoperate with each other!] I don't know of any reason why the OLPC plugin shouldn't work on a Linux system, barring perhaps some dependency problems (e.g. new enough version of libdbus). -- Dafydd ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
