This would be great!

Cheers,
Karl



On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>wrote:

> Etoys [1] is pre-installed on millions of OLPC XO-Laptops worldwide [2].
> Running under Sugar [3] (the XO's Linux-based UI) it provides collaboration
> support for class rooms: students can send scripted objects to each other
> to easily combine their work.
>
> In a non-Sugar system (Mac, Windows, regular Linux) this collaboration
> support is not readily available. The code is there, but to use it students
> would have to manually enter IP addresses, because the discovery protocol
> relies on Sugar's "presence service".
>
> To a user this should look very simple: She pops up a window which lists
> all the other Etoys users nearby, so she can choose one to connect to. Then
> the two can exchange messages and objects. The latter part is already
> there, what is needed is the discovery of other users.
>
> The task would be to make the collaboration work on a wider range of
> systems. One approach would be using the Telepathy framework [4] which is
> underlying Sugar's presence service (and in fact this would help Sugar,
> since they have phased out the PS and are using Telepathy directly). This
> should work easily under Linux, and might be portable to other platforms.
> Another advantage of this approach would be that Sugar users can
> collaborate with non-Sugar users, and across network boundaries (NAT etc).
>
> Alternatively, a simple broadcast-based protocol could be created. The
> advantage would be that it would work identically on all platforms and not
> require system support. It may, however, be less robust and general than
> what Telepathy provides. It might also interfere with other network
> services. Also, collaboration between Sugar- and non-Sugar users might be
> problematic. The simplicity of this approach may outweigh the
> disadvantages, though.
>
> Level: medium to advanced depending on approach
>
> Skills: Smalltalk, Networking (plus DBus and cross-platform development if
> using Telepathy)
>
> Mentor: Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>
>
> [1] http://squeakland.org/
> [2] http://laptop.org/
> [3] http://sugarlabs.org/
> [4] http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/
> _______________________________________________
> etoys-dev mailing list
> etoys-dev at squeakland.org
> http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
>
>
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