Progress Since Last Report
Since the last report, I have continued work on the implementation, hoping to finish this week or early next week. I have added file load/save functionality to the server, finished the basic chatting capabilities, and have started on supporting different colors for the changes different users make, although this feature needs more work to be completely usable.
I did look at the Scintilla code editing component, it will be too complex to integrate in the time remaining for this project. This is quite a dissappointment, because one of my original goals was for this tool to be used for programming. If a programming text editor is not included, this is not very likely to happen. But again, with so short a time to complete the project, this is too big an undertaking for a single person.
Some time was spent into looking at publications, both those dealing with the technical aspects of implementing a real time collaborative system, and more general frameworks for collaboration. Having found about 5 good papers on these topics, I need read them in more depth, and pull out ideas into a conceptual framework.
Plan for remaining work
I need to find ways to tie the editor into a conceptual framework for collaboration. I will spend time reading the publications I have found, and work out how to integrate some of the ideas found there with my implementation work.
An anlysis will be performed comparing my tool with other collaborative editors, both real (SubEthaEdit) and non-real time (the collaborative features in standard office products). How do the features offered in each tool compare with what I establish in my conceptual framework?
As far as the implementation goes, I need to finished the user color support and provide a way to allow the user to set their color, add in user names so chat messages can be distinguished (possibly also using the user color here).
What is the potential for future work? Can this tool be further extended, or at least some portion of it broken out, to provide the features of a programming text editor?