> At it's simplest level, operational transforms enable synchronisation of a > distributed structured document. In this respect, the server and the client > are identical, they both need to be able to fold in edits in the form of > DocOps.
If only this were true in the case of Wave. OT system are usually symmetrical in their OT functions and control algorithms, however, this is absolutely not true for Wave where the client is much more complicated than the server with respect to how it handles operations. Google gave up the elegance of symmetry in an attempt to lighten the load on the server at the expense of burdening on the client. I agree with Brett when he says, "At it's simplest level, operational transforms enable synchronisation of a distributed structured document." And I think this pokes holes in much of the discussion in this thread. The communication between server and client is merely to exchange operations performed on a copy of the document. As such, I think it is very unlikely that we will see a number of client/server protocols akin to POP and IMAP, where POP and IMAP are very different animals. Personally I think that there first needs to be a discussion about the client OT algorithms. Once the algorithms are well known, messages to be sent between client and server can be defined. With the message schema defined, many encodings of the messages can be implemented (XML, JSON, etc...) and any number of transport protocols can be used to sent the encoded messages (HTTP, SMTP, XMLRPC, etc). The most important "standard" here is the message schema, not the encoding, and not the transport protocol. There are two ways to establish a standard. One is the committee approach, which seems to have been going on here until the last few messages. The other is for a standard to emerge through popularity - people voting with you feet, so to speak. In the early stages I would prefer to see the latter happen; and we can see this happening with the Pygowave guys already. I think that the best approach for the moment it to leverage the good work done by the Pygowave team and build upon it. Offering alternate encodings of their messages would be a good start. Cheers, Dan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Wave Protocol" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol?hl=en.
