Local or cloud depends on your requirements. I happen to prefer local,
stand-alone capability for Open Slate, with network connections just a
way to research and collaborate, and log telemetry (student
performance).

The choice of XMPP server will require a reasonable amount of testing,
and may be influenced by your ability to use commercial software, GPL
software, etc. You can try out XMPP by creating a free account on
Jabber. Mostly acts like any old school chat program, a la AIM. Kind
of passe these days, what with SMS and Twitter. What we are interested
in is the ability to know who is available at the moment. XMPP is not
very useful as a data exchange format, rather slow. HTTP being an
obvious alternative.

I believe Etoys has an XMPP class. No need to reinvent the wheel. The
best man to speak to that is Bert Freudenberg, the squeaker behind the
whole Etoys OLPC movement.

-- 
Gary Dunn
Honolulu
http://openslate.org

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Brad Fuller <bradallenfuller at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow Gary, thanks.
>
> I gleen from your reply that you think going the "client" route - with
> an app on the user pc - and then connecting to the cloud as need, is a
> proper, or best approach for this idea.
>
> So, looking through the Presence info and then taking the XMPP link,
> it seems that Apache already has an XMPP service and there\s a list of
> many more. I have no idea what this really mean, but maybe it means an
> XMPP client can be created in squeak and work with your own XMPP
> service? Again, I"m only speculating after looking at this in 10min.
>
> thanks,
> brad
>
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 16:37, Gary Dunn <garydunnhi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have been investigating similar issues for the Open Slate Project.
>> Many challenges to overcomes, but it is possible.
>>
>>    o Security
>>    o Presence, as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presence_information
>>    o Version synchronization, dependencies
>>
>> I have been poking around in Nebraska. Realistically only applicable
>> in a LAN environment and even then awkward by today's standards, but
>> not so bad if the goal is to learn how it works -- what is an IP
>> address, what does it do, where does it come from. In Nebraska you can
>> share a desktop and have several people access and work on a common
>> project.
>>
>> You should look at the OLPC implementation of Etoys. They have
>> replaced Nebraska with other technology better suited to Internet
>> usage.  I think it adds XMPP for presence. http://www.squeakland.org/
>> and http://www.sugarlabs.org/
>>
>> Good luck!
>>
>> --
>> Gary Dunn
>> Honolulu
>> http://openslate.org
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 5:03 AM, Brad Fuller <bradallenfuller at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> For some reason, I knew it would be you, Bert, who would reply ;-)
>>>
>>> Ok, I'll look again for what you suggested later today. Thanks !
>>>
>>> But, while I'm on the subject: Maybe there's a better way than the
>>> plugin for my needs.  I'm looking for the best way(s) to have
>>> applications be "connected" to other people (not locally). What does
>>> "connected" mean? I don't know exactly, yet. I'm still in the early
>>> stages of writing the proposal. I know the apps will be
>>> interactive/exploratory "modules" for educational subjects. But I
>>> would like a major portion of their facility to share ideas among
>>> others with the same modules, get input from remote instructors (and
>>> hopefully to receive code updates.) I thought maybe it could be just
>>> an AJAX-type web service where everything could be done from the
>>> backend server. But, it seems a better approach would be to use the
>>> power of a local application that is "connected" or has "access" to
>>> the other remote applications.
>>>
>>> Smalltalk is not a requirement, but it seems to be a no-brainer when
>>> it comes to quickly prototyping on multiple platforms.
>>>
>>> Any direction is most humbly welcomed
>>>
>>> brad
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 02:29, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>>>> On 12.07.2011, at 03:05, Brad Fuller wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hey all,
>>>>>
>>>>> Does the etoys/squeak web browser plugin still work?
>>>>
>>>> It should.
>>>>
>>>>> If so, where do I get it and how to I install?
>>>>
>>>> In theory it should just work after installing Etoys. Also in theory, theory and practice are the same.
>>>>
>>>>> Specifically, I'm running Ubuntu at the moment, but would like it to
>>>>> work on other platforms as well. I've "installed" the debian packages
>>>>> of etoys, but that doesn't seem to contain the plugin.
>>>>
>>>> The plugin should be in /usr/lib/squeak/<version>, called npsqueak.so. There should be a script "npsqueakregister" in /usr/lib/squeak. That script should have been run by the installer. It should have placed a symlink to npsqueak.so in the browser's plugins directory. The plugin should be listed in Firefox's "about:plugins" (possibly after restarting the browser).
>>>>
>>>> Would be interesting to know which of these steps failed.
>>>>
>>>> If you can't make it work, there is an unofficial way of making Etoys-To-Go work as a plugin. For that, download Etoys-To-Go from http://squeakland.org/ , unzip in your home directory, and run the Contents/Linux-i686/npetoysregister script.
>>>>
>>>> - Bert -
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>