Contents 1 NEW: KOffice -- collaborative editing 1.1 What is collaborative editor? 1.2 Planned functionality 1.3 Project plan 1.4 What will not be done 1.5 Links

[edit] NEW: KOffice -- collaborative editing

Name: Igor Stepin

Mentor: Cyrille Berger

I plan to implement real-time collaborative editing for KWord. This would allow the owner of the document to invite people via IM or other ways to work with him/her on the document. I'm planning implementation of KWord support only (support of other applications will be also implemented, after work on KWord is complete).

[edit] What is collaborative editor?

From Wikipedia: A collaborative editor is a software application that allows several people to edit a computer file using different computers. There are two types of collaborative editors, real-time and non-real-time. Real-time collaborative editors allow users to edit the same file at anytime, including editing at the same time. Non-real-time collaborative editors do not allow editing of the same file at the same time. Non-real-time collaborative editors are similar to revision control systems.

[edit] Planned functionality

This is the list of collaboration functionality that should be implemented.

• Publish local documents.
• Session initiation via IM or zeroconf.
• Collaborative plain-text editing in a shared document.
• Possible collaborative rich-text (fonts, styles, etc.) editing in a shared document.
• Disconnect users.

[edit] Project plan

• Investigate current implementations. Write prototypes for some of them. Evaluate at least libobby, MateEdit, and DrawPile. Choose base for implementation. (1 week)
• Define draft of interfaces for the collaboration API. Make prototype of UI. Show them to mentor and KOffice developers. (1 week)
• Write unit tests for API. Configure test environment for KWord (to speed-up testing). (0,5 week)
• Implementation of main features. Integration with KWord. (3 weeks)
• Bug fixes and reserved time. (3 weeks)

[edit] What will not be done

• Only integration with KWord is planned.
• Probably, rich-text communication (different fonts and paragraph

styles) will not be implemented.

• Specific techniques for NAT traversal or UPnP/PMP-enabled firewall/router configuration will not be implemented.
• Images, tables and other complex 'objects' in the document will not be supported.

[edit] Links

Link to the Google's page of project: http://code.google.com/soc/kde/appinfo.html?csaid=1F1FBA0ECFDF0877

Link to the detailed description: http://www.stepin.name/soc2007/

Link to the project's blog: http://www.stepin.name/category/soc/