[Server-devel] scalability in the neighborhood view

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Hi all,

based on a conversation in #sugar with Collabora's Rob and Sjoerd,
would like to propose some changes to how we display contacts/buddies
in Sugar with the goal of improving scalability in the use cases we
care most about. I know in these lists are people with a very good
knowledge of how collaboration is being used (or not!) in the field,
so I will greatly appreciate your feedback.

- In the neighborhood view, display all users in our roster: user
roster + shared roster. The user roster will be composed by the
contacts that we have added ourselves and, in the Salut case, the
contacts accessible through Avahi. The shared roster will be assigned
by the school administration (through Moodle?) and will typically
correspond to our classroom or our grade. I think that Martin Langhoff
has worked on the server side of this.

- In the friends view, we display those contacts that we have
"friended", being this a local concept.

- In the neighborhood view, we can conduct a search that will span all
contacts in the server (not only those in our rosters). The search
will be done via the regular underlying mechanism, not through Gadget.

I think this can allow us to scale up both in the client and in the
server side in a way that keeps us very close to what other Telepathy
clients do. We'll be breaking anything our users rely upon?

With the goal of improving the maintainability of our presence code I
will be removing the presence service, so now is a good moment to
discuss these issues and make a good plan.

Thanks,

Tomeu