GSoC proposal: collaborative editor

[David Edmundson]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Othmane Moustaouda
<othmane.moustaouda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> From mailing list I have known that I have a "concurrent", good! A
> little bit of competition will encourages both us to pull out the
> best! :D
>
> Returning to the project, after reading documents and after some
> investigations now I have clearer ideas about how to implement it:
> since is a plain text editor I have to focus only on the text content,
> omitting details like font size, font type ecc., so I thought that
> should be possible to manage the text's changes through a mechanism
> based on diffs, i.e. each time an user makes a change to the shared
> text, a diff will be generated and shared to all other participants.
>
> In order to make this possible, in my vision, something like a
> checksum is needed, to ensure that all participants are working on the
> same text. Another key point is that one of participants must act as a
> "central node", why? Because if, for example, due to a network issue,
> one or more participants have a different version, what is the right
> version on which to base the different others? Is the one hosted by
> the participant that is acting as central node. Who can play this role
> can be, for example, who has started the collaboration, or maybe
> better, who has the fastest connection.
>
> All these informations will be transmitted via a D-Bus Tube, I thought
> that for this case a D-Bus Tube is more convenient for use than a
> Stream Tube as it offers the possibility to handle events via signals
> (for example an user login or logout, or a text modify).
>
> About the diff part, since Qt doesn't offer something for generating a
> diff between two strings, I have to use some kind of library that
> offers a diff algorithm, searching I found  a very few of interesting
> things, one of them is this (
> http://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/ ) a very nice
> library! I thought that maybe is better using a well known library
> available already packaged?
>
> I made an initial UI draft, it's very basic, something like a starting point
> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61029609/ui_draft1.png
> a little graphical detail (adopted by almost collaborative editors)
> could be that each participant will have its own color and every
> addition made by him will have that color as background.
>
> Surely I wrote something stupid, let me know please! :D
>

Nice! Well thought through, good research into existing tech.
Especially the different types of tubes.

Quick word change - on a stream tube, you'd still have a dbus
connection to telepathy so you'd get signals for
entering/disconnecting. You're absolutely right a dbus one some
advantages (like the last one you mentioned) but the contacts in the
room isn't one.

+1 on the mockup. When I say mockup that's exactly the sort of thing
I'm hoping for.

Things to add in the next version:
- about you
- what you've done code wise before
- tentative timeline (important!)
- something that makes our collaborative editor stick out from the
others. (i.e why would one use this over google docs)



>
> Othmane
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