On Mar 20, 2010, at 4:43 PM, Lawson English wrote:
Darn. I was hoping I was getting my plug and play P2P networking on Second Life-ST-based collaboration stuff for free.
nothing is free ;-)
The "Cobalt on a Prim" plugin should work pretty well, but its only going to be an oddity. Far more interesting will be to allow Nebraska-like/Cobalt-like sharing of applications without the extra overhead of VNC. My original plan was to somehow extract the TeaTime/Cobalt Island functionality and make it the networking layer between two instances of the Squeak-SL Plugin:
Second Life <=> Squeak <=> Cobalt island (sans avatars and such) <=> Cobalt island <=> Squeak <=> Second Life
Replacing "Cobalt" with "Nebraska" looked like a much simpler way to go (on paper) but obviously, it won't work with Pharo. Eventually, Cobalt will be remerged with Trunk so that it can work with the latest Squeak or Pharo. I guess I can fudge something for P2P that isn't quite so elegant in the meantime.
Hmm... I am now expert on either of Nebraska or Croquet... but I used Nebraska over the internet (vs. local network) once: When Alan gave his keynote at CERN using my computer. We had to use a 1-bit black-and-white hacked version of nebraska and nevertheless Alan had a lag of some seconds (!!!) between what happend on my machine and what he saw via nebraska on his. Of course, the talk went *perfect* and we could have sold Squeak/Nebraska to the audience as *the* collaboration tool. But in practice, this was barely usable. (on the local network it works quite well, though).
OTOH, maybe Nebraska can be implemented on top of TeaTime/Cobalt once its available in Pharo.
This is definitlly the way to go: have a good model for cross-image replication, than use that as the basis. Having two mechanisms that work completely differently is bound to make more problems than you want to deal with. Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.