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Google Wave ECF provider

Student: Sebastian Schmidt

Mentor: Mustafa K. Isik

This project is part of the Google Summer of Code 2010

Abstract

Google Wave is a real-time collaboration system based upon operational transformation approach to replicated state synchronization. With the Cola System (DocShare), ECF has been using operational transformations, for some time now. I will implement a provider to allow an equinox+ecf based web server to inter-operate with Google Wave.

Primary goals

Legend
Glass.gif Needs some research

Progress.gif Work in progress

Ok green.gif Feature added

Progress.gif Implementation of a Google Wave ECF provider that people can use to build their own wave applications on top of ECF. The provider will handle the basic wave-protocol operations like managing waves, contacts and documents. Also the provider will provide an API which allows users to add listeners to wave changes and implement real time shared editing applications.

Glass.gif Implementation of real time shared editing support for eclipse. Currently there are cola and docshare, which allow document based real time shared editing for two collaborators in eclipse. With the help of the wave protocol I want to improve this approach and allow more than two collaborators to work on one document at the same time. Once you logged into your wave account using the well known ECF UI, you will be able to share a text-based document for collaborative editing with your friends on your or any standards compliant third-party wave server. Currently, Google does not provide API access to their official Wave service, their developer sandbox remains open though and can be utilized in scenarios where another Wave server is not available. It is likely that ECF will have its own instance of a free-for-all Wave server running.

On the horizon

In their GSoC welcome package Google told us to "think big and have fun". That's why Mustafa and I already have spoken about ideas we have for the time after the end of GSoC 2010. The wave protocol allows to handle more than a single document (= wavelet / blips) in a wave. With an appropriate mapping of Wave components such as Waves to projects and Wavelet/Blips to resources such as sourcecode files, this feature can be adopted to introduce project-based real time shared editing to eclipse. Hopefully we will be able to share a complete project with fellow developers at some point and collaborate with them on multiple files and folders in real time.

I would really appreciate to get inspiring ideas from the community. So please feel free to provide feedback and share your ideas.

Timeline

Milestone Date Planned/Completed/Progressing  items status
M1 May 5 research and planning Ok green.gif
M2 July 1 ecf wave provider implementation Progress.gif
M3 TBD real time shared editing for eclipse (basic version: one document, multiple collaborators) Glass.gif
M4 TBD bughunting, documentation Glass.gif

Meetings

In addition to the weekly ECF conference call on Mondays, both of us will be syncing up via another call Tuesdays around 11:30AM PST - that is 20:30h in Germany. Feel free to join us. In order to do so, you'll have to either ping Sebastian (schmidt-seb) or Mustafa (codesurgeon) via Skype chat. You'll be invited to the conference call.

Getting the source

The Wave provider is hosted at github.


Open issues

To see all the open issues and feature requests of this project, take a look at this Bugzilla query.

New ideas

Do you have a great idea for the provider? Just open a new feature request or comment on the existing enhancement request.

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