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Re: [ecf-dev] Team Meeting Manager

Hi Kerri,

Thanks for letting us know about this project.  First off, would you be able/willing to contribute your work back to the ECF project? (under Eclipse Public License)?  It sounds like some of what you are doing with team task creation could/will be helpful for ECF and perhaps several other projects at the EF (Mylar, Corona).

Edlund, Kerri L wrote:

Hello,

 

My name is Kerri.  My friend Sarah and I are working on a new plug-in for Eclipse as our Major Project in college at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  We will be utilizing ECF so that teams (SourceForge teams) can hold meetings.  We are thinking that we will make the chat editable because we want the user(s) to be able to connect to SourceForge and create tasks to put into their project from the chat.  We want the users to be able to highlight text within the chat (and be able to edit it, if necessary) and form there they will be able to right click and assign the task.  A GUI will pop up so that the user can fill in all of the necessary details for the task and then submit it.  After submission, the task will go into the team’s SourceForge project.


Very cool.  Early on with ECF the committers had discussed creating something similar to this...basically something to allow team task creation and assignment from within a collaboration/meeting space.

One thing I would be a little careful of, however...the ability to edit chat text (especially someone else's chat utterances) can be somewhat confusing for participants, as it means that the 'history' of the conversation is then not identical among all participants...and this can be interpreted incorrectly by people ("I didn't say that").  You might want to give the use case a little thought to be sure that if you allow people to edit the chat text directly that you indicate somehow that this has happened...or provide some 'fixed' view (normal chat) along with an editable view/copy.  Just some thoughts.

 

I am writing this e-mail becaucse we were wondering if anyone had any ideas as to how this could be done.  As of now, ECF’s chat pane is not editable and so that will definitely need to change, but should we recreate, or extend? 


I think if you are certain that you want it to be an editor (rather than, say bringing up an editor for text from the chat) you should recreate.  Actually, I would suggest that you 'recreate but reuse'.   What I mean by this is that the current chat UI (org.eclipse.ecf.example.collab.ui.LineChatView) is a view (extends ViewPart) and it probably could pretty easily be made into an editor...by creating new classes that are modified versions of the existing classes (modified to extend EditorPart rather than ViewPart).  You could create a new editor-based chat, and reuse the relevant code from the ECF example collab UI and/or the org.eclipse.ecf.ui classes.

BUT I want to caution that particularly the example collab codebase is not particularly well designed (I can say this for sure as I did it myself several years ago while learning SWT/JFace)...especially to be an editor rather than a view.  I've been actually thinking that I would like to replace this interface work totally with something done by someone that knows SWT/JFace much better than me (I'm mostly a network code/middleware person)...perhaps this could be one result from this project?  Would you be willing to consider contributing such work back to ECF/EF or other projects?

Is what I described above a good idea?  What changes would you make?  How would you do this?  Just some questions to think about so that we can get some feedback and hit the ground running with it.  Thank you for your time and assistance.


Yes, I do think it's a good idea.  I'm also copying Mik Kersten on this thread (lead of the Mylar project: http://www.eclipse.org/mylar/) as we have been trying to combine ECF and Mylar for some time now and perhaps this will provide an opportunity to do so.

Please let us know (via this list and/or ecf newsgroup) how you proceed and how we can help further.

Thanks,

Scott


 

Sincerely,

 

Kerri Edlund

Worcester Polytechnic Institute - 2007

Computer Science Major

Spanish Minor

CAS101 Counselor

WICS (Women in Computer Science) President

 


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