[racket] Google Summer of Code 2012 Ideas

FWIW, what I had in mind is something lower-tech where we rely on the
users doing the shared editing to help us out when conflicts happen
(perhaps coordinating via chat, perhaps using a token they explicitly
pass around or something).

Robby

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 6:41 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> 9 hours ago, Stephen Bloch wrote:
>>
>> I don't actually have a github account, but I wanted to mention the
>> following idea both to current Racket developers and to potential
>> student programmers.  Could somebody add it to the wiki for me?
>>
>> Summary: a DrRacket plug-in to enable real-time collaborative
>> editing of a source file, possibly with fine-grained logging as
>> well.  Two or more different programmers each edit the same file
>> simultaneously, and edits one of them make show up immediately on
>> the others' screens.
>
> Having two (or more) people who *edit* the code simultaneously (in
> contrast to having a shared screen such as a VNC session), is going to
> be hard.  The easy implementation will require each edit to go to the
> server that does the shared editing, which is likely going to be too
> slow to be convenient even on a LAN.
>
> But there is a perfect fit here: the "Operational Transformation"
> thing that is used by etherpad and later by google wave.  Implementing
> that might be difficult, but one possibility to make things easier is
> to use etherpad-lite (a node.js server) to orchestrate the shared
> editing.  As a bonus, it has the fine-grained edit history that you
> want.  I don't know how hard it will be to plug into it from an
> application though -- but another option is to do the editing in a
> browser, using etherpad-lite for the editing backend, and showing the
> result of clicking "run" in a window.  (But implementing this is a
> different object...)
>
> (BTW, I'm looking into using it for a wiki, with the same goal of
> making it do the shared editing part.)
>
>
>> Requirements/Difficulty: Will need to hook into DrRacket.  Will need
>> some kind of server, with user authentication and permissions (so a
>> specified set of students have access to the shared file); see the
>> project already on the Wiki about adding git support to DrRacket.
>
> Note that this kind of project is not really related to git.
>
>
>> [...] I'm thinking of something that effectively pushes every few
>> seconds, but only every several pushes become a distinct "commit"
>> record.
>
> (The problem with a naive approach like this is that it won't be able
> to handle simultaneous edits to the same piece of text.)
>
> --
>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
> ____________________
>  Racket Users list:
>  http://lists.racket-lang.org/users