Next phase of abicollab.

OK now tht I have code to serialize and de-selerize abi-commands. The next
phase will be to set up a network connection between two instances of
abiword.

The idea is to send the serialized editting output of each instance to
each other and to turn these packets back into manipulations of the
abiword document.

This part of th eproject will be just to ensure that packets from one
instance get transported to other and to ensure that all the issues of
authenticating a remote instance to edit your document, to find the remote
instance on the network, disconnect instances and transmit a
re-synchronized document work.

After that I plan to implement all the fancy network-lag issues that can
cause loss of synchronization.

So, regarding the network connection. My plan is to use xmpp protocol that
underlies the jabber instant message application. inkscape-0.43 has a
whole collection of useful code in the directory "whiteboard".

I have never done ANY network programming so I'll be learning as I work on
this. I've briefly looked over the whiteboard code (which is GPL). My plan
is to copy and paste large chunks and hack away all the inkscape specific
stuff until I can get the important parts of the network code to compile.

After that, I'll graft in the AbiWord serializer/deserializer code and
attempt to make the network connection work.

I will almost certainly make a lot of mistakes as I work through this but
hey, I've also always wanted to understand how all this works.

Cheers!

Martin
Received on Wed Dec 7 14:05:52 2005