SyncroEdit integration

Introduction

The goal of this project is to integrate the synchronous editor SynchroEdit (http://www.synchroedit.com) in twiki : propose besides "edit" or "wysiwyg edit" a "sync edit" button. You press the syncedit button on a topic and it runs synchroedit on that topic. Other users that press the same button will join the edit session and will be able to edit the topic's content at the same time. SynchroEdit saves the topic every 5 seconds.

Another user who comes to the Topic will see a message "this topic is currently being synchro edited by 5 twik users : " followed by the users's twiki names. Current state of the topic is displayed and a simple refresh will show it updated.

How does this work ?

Ok, we are not exactly editiong the real twiki topic. Imagine you go to a topic named Test.SynchroEditMe. First, as synchroedit only reads and writes xhtml, the topic is copied somewhere, then the current real topic will turn into a %INCLUDE{...} of the topic being synchro edited, so that updates by pressing the refresh button will work and the message "this topic is being synchro edited" will be displayed. Pressing the synchro edit button does several things :

• If you are the first one to press this button, it will run a shell script that creates a session : run a server, copy the topic's content, etc...

• If you are not the first one, the script will make you join the ongoing session.

Questions / Problems

• So far, you have to login everytime to the syncrho edit server, even if you identified yourselves within twiki.
• The synchro edited topic's history is available in synchro edit with small labels and color codes, but this is not compatible with TWIki's history. The "logical" thing would be : "rev 1.13, updated by Michel, John, Colas etc..." in a synchronous session... Hmmm how can we handle this...
• Synchro edit is still in alpha stage. It works pretty well but the server cannot handle several sessions at the same time. Only one page can be synchroedited a t a time, otherwise another server must be run, using different ports. We are in contact with the developers and they were already thinking about a way to handle this.
• Synchro edit comes with a single php script and the server is java based (but could be rewritten in another langage). So, turning this project into a nice twiki plugin, easy to install, can be a pain. Hopefully, servers will be available in other langages.

Screenshots of ongoing work

Very preliminary screenshots...

• So far, pressing the sync edit button launched the sync edit server and starts a session on a twiki topic (not the current page yet) by running a twiki/bin/syncedit script:
  
• Two users editing a twiki page that has been translated from tml to html. Page is saved in turn into tml every 5 seconds by the synchro edit server :
  

-- MichelBuffa - 02 Feb 2006

Discussion

Is this project still alive? This seems damn useful.

-- MikkoLaakso - 11 Mar 2007

I don't think this particular project is, but SynchroEdit is alive still. SynchroEdit is a more recent topic on this .. topic.

-- KalleAlm - 13 Mar 2007