[ecf-dev] shared editing design thought

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

We at BEA have/will/are doing some work with using ECF to add real-time 
shared editing to commercial and OS editors...i.e. text editors, 
structured editors (e.g. java, other langs, xml, etc), graphical 
editors, and the like.

I was thinking yesterday was that it is typically unnecessarily 
difficult to setup a sharing/editing session.  It usually has to be 
explicitly done by one or both participants prior to the actual shared 
editing...and it's often error prone.

This is true also of the existing cola shared editor...the setup of the 
shared editing session is kind of cumbersome.

I had one thought about how this could be easier...and I thought I would 
throw it out to the mailing list:

Let's assume that user 'slewis' has a (e.g.) text editor open.  At a 
certain point, they decide that they would like to initiate a shared 
editing session with another party (e.g. 'codesurgeon').  At that point, 
'slewis' has to initiate a shared editing session. 

What if they simply opened the editor's context menu, and chose 
'Share'->codesurgeon...and this initiated a shared editing session with 
codesurgeon.  This begs the question, though...where does the 
'Share'->codesurgeon menu come from?  My answer:  Using Eclipse's new 
dynamic menu contribution mechanisms, it could be dynamically created 
from the ECF Contacts/buddy list.  That is, when the user chose 'Share' 
it could produce a menu hierarchy that corresponded to the entries in 
the contacts list (whatever the active ones happened to be at that 
moment)...allowing the initiator to choose the target user for the 
shared editing session.  The Eclipse menu contribution mechanisms should 
allow this (i.e. dynamic creation of hierarchical menus...plus the 
ability to retarget actions), and ECF allows programmatic access to the 
buddy list via IPresenceContainerAdapter.getRosterManager().   Further, 
it would be possible to add such a thing in a new plugin (rather than 
modifying the existing editor's code) to increase separation of concerns.

Any thoughts/comments about this approach?

Scott







Let's also




That is,  between...perhaps one way on how to setup a 'session for 
shared editing' (between 2 participants is initial focus...2+ will 
probably be for later).