Personally, I would like to see a wave like system with federation
widely adopted so:
- i can use it for my own collaboration
- it can be made available for integration / other websites & applications
- and allows a choice of clients
Other stuff such as the code/compiler integration might be useful to me,
but not in the short term.
Federation is really the key thing for me, and WIAB is the closest thing
I'm aware of to achieving that.
In terms of the problem: Code complexity is the only one that I've
experienced. The WIAB codebase isn't small, and takes a bit to get your
head around it. I certainly think that some refactoring, modularising
the codebase and documentation would ease this.
From a limited understanding, I think all of my goals can be achieved
with incremental improvements to WIAB. Of course, I was interested to
learn about some limitations in the wave algorithms.
---
But my question was more from an observation of recent discussions here
and on the Wave Forward hangout, about the potential advantages (which I
don't yet fully understand) of alternative approaches.
There's a fair amount of interest in wave-like services, but a number of
incompatible approaches. I'm thrilled by the goals of greater
collaboration between us - and was trying to understand what that means
in terms of wiab code.
Dave
On 11/06/13 21:28, Michael MacFadden wrote:
Dave,
I guess the question I would ask before going down this road isŠ what is
the problem that you are currently seeing in WIAB that you would
attributed to either the OT Algorithm and/or its implementation?
What problem are we trying to solve through option 1/2?
~Michael
On 6/11/13 9:25 PM, "Dave" <w...@glark.co.uk> wrote:
Cool. Thanks Michael.
I guess the reason I'm keen to understand the pros/cons is because it
looks as though we're heading to a point where the wave community needs
to figure out the direction for Apache wave and the wiab codebase
(within appropriate [DISCUSS] and [VOTE] threads of course). Probably as
part of the larger conversation that John Blossom started.
I'm beginning to think we're talking about two discrete directions:
1) The wave OT or protocol are broken & not fit for purpose. We should
implement different OT and / or protocol which is (likely) incompatible
with the existing implementations. Potentially this could involve
junking the current wiab codebase, and implementing a new wave like
platform (potentially on top of existing non-wiab code).
2) Wave OT and protocol are good-enough for our immediate / mid-term
desires, but the wiab implementations could be stronger. We want to
focus on expanding the ecosystem - enabling different clients,
simplifying federation, tidying the codebase. I.e. convert what we've
got into a useful product.
With enough resource, maybe we could aim for Apache wave to take both
directions - expand the ecosystem now and work on long-term incompatible
changes, but given the lack of an existing install base this might not
be an ideal choice.
Until recently, I assumed we were just heading for #2, but there's
clearly some desire for #1, and some known weaknesses in Wave's current
approach.
Certainly OT state-of-the-art has moved on significantly since the wave
implementation, but should wave be on the bleeding edge of OT? Or are
our developers and community more focused on a slick (and feature rich)
implementation of the core technology google demo'd a few years back?
I've got lots of questions and very few answers, but hopefully we're
getting more clarity on what we want/expect from this community.
Dave
