[Server-devel] EduBlog Revised Project Plan

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 7:00 PM, Alexander Dupuy <alex.dupuy at mac.com> wrote:
> Greg Smith wrote:
>> For starters, there's no group edit needed. They can share "browse" if
>> they want to edit concurrently. I was thinking of just "post" or "start
>> over" as the first pass.
>>
>
> Like a lot of people, Greg over-estimates the level of collaboration
> possible in shared Sugar activities.  While the Edit activity has a
> higher level of sharing (all children see the same document, updated in
> real-time) this was done as a major feature enhancement (under contract
> from OLPC, I believe) by the Abiword developers.  Sharing in the Browse
> activity is much more limited - you can share links by clicking on the
> star at the top of the screen (yes, that's what that mysterious icon is
> for) but the browser instances are otherwise totally independent, so
> that when one child navigates to another page, the other children will
> not see that page, unless the first child shares the link by clicking on
> the star, and the other children then click on the thumbnail image of
> the shared page that appears in the tray at the bottom.
>
> See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse#Collaboration for the details.
>
> Given this limited level of collaboration in the Browse activity, it
> seems very unlikely that even some hypothetical enhanced and more
> collaborative version in another year would support shared edit boxes of
> the sort provided by the Write activity (especially if those boxes have
> JavaScript or other features associated with them).
>
> I'm not sure what impact this detail has on the plan for EduBlog, but if
> collaborative editing is desired, there are basically two approaches:
>
> * Try to build it into the XS server pages - this would be very tricky,
> and probably only practical in the given timeframe if you build on an
> existing tool like http://www.synchroedit.com/ or
> http://code.google.com/p/google-mobwrite/ and that tool works
> out-of-the-box with the Browse activity (both tools depend heavily on
> JavaScript).
>
> or
>
> * Take libabiword and use it in a blog-posting activity that interacts
> with the XS (Moodle) server pages.
>
> Personally, I think the second is a better approach, but given the
> server-side-only constraint, this takes collaborative editing out of the
> project plan for the initial effort this summer.

The second option sounds well to me and may be quite doable, but I
would like to take the opportunity to mention one old project of me
that didn't got much far:

http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/abiword-embed;a=summary

This would allow to embed in a web page the same editor widget that
Write uses, very similarly to how flash is embedded in web pages,
example:

http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/abiword-embed;a=blob;f=tests/abiword.html;h=337ab3bd7f95bd3758d384b97baa58f0fba8188e;hb=HEAD

If I remember correctly, it was starting to work when I dropped it.

Maybe that could give us text boxes with collaboration enabled? Wonder
how the UI for such a thing would look like...

Regards,

Tomeu