Guidance sought on collaboration techniques

[James Simmons]

Wade,

I'll have to check out the code in Colors!  What I really need is some 
sample code and some good docs on the APIs available.  What I have now 
was copied from the Read activity, and not all of it is clear to me.  If 
I understood what APIs were available that would be a big help.  I will 
welcome feedback on my code once I have something good enough to 
criticize, but I'm not there yet.

Thanks,

James Simmons


Wade Brainerd wrote:
> Hey James,
>
> I can help you out with this if you want.
>
> Your collaboration design sounds fine to me.  I did something similar 
> in Colors! where certain parts of the UI are disabled on the joining 
> instances.
>
> What point are you at now?  Do you need an example to get started 
> with, or feedback about existing code, or just ideas about which APIs 
> to use?  
>
> Best,
> Wade
>
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 4:55 PM, James Simmons 
> <jim.simmons at walgreens.com <mailto:jim.simmons at walgreens.com>> wrote:
>
>     Benjamin,
>
>     I had been using two machines to develop my Activities.  One ran
>     Xubuntu
>     and used the sugar packages provided with the Sugar Live CD that
>     someone
>     made up.  These were not perfect, but it was a simpler way to set up a
>     Sugar test environment than anything else available at the time.  My
>     second box was running openSUSE 10.2 and I attempted to install
>     Sugar-jhbuild on it with middling success.  I had both pointing to the
>     Collabora server to test sharing, and what I found was the sharing
>     through that server worked OK for small files (like Read Etexts used)
>     but took forever for slideshows, and frequently ran out of gas in the
>     middle of a transfer.  As for collaboration between two instances of
>     Sugar with no jabber server between them, that never worked at
>     all, even
>     a little bit.
>
>     As of last night both machines have Fedora 10 with the Sugar RPMs
>     installed, so this should eliminate lots of problems I had in the
>     past.
>     I don't expect it to make large file transfers through the jabber
>     server
>     any faster, though.  Plus, in my opinion copying a file from one XO to
>     another would be better done as a function of the Journal.  It
>     isn't my
>     idea of what real collaboration should be.  The VNC idea, while
>     worthwhile, doesn't excite me either.
>
>     As an XO user I have no use for collaboration.  I have nobody to play
>     with.  I could strip the collaboration code out of both my Activities
>     and have something more than adequate for my own use.  My goal is to
>     create Activities that will get other kids excited about using
>     them.  My
>     idea is a modest step in that direction.  If I get that much working
>     other ideas may come.
>
>     I would like to stick with API's that are currently available for a
>     couple of reasons:
>
>     1).  I want to use the Sugar environment in Fedora 10.  Now that I
>     finally have a robust test environment I don't want to lose it.
>     2).  I want to make the Activity available to the largest number of
>     users possible.
>
>     I think telepathy might do the job for me if I just understood it
>     better.  All I'm asking it to do is send some messages to a list of
>     buddies and have them initiate some file transfers.  Chat is already
>     doing the first part, I think, and the Read code might be persuaded to
>     do the second.
>
>     Thanks,
>
>     James Simmons
>
>
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