Kobby, Collaborative Editing
For this year’s Google Summer of Code I will be creating a KTextEditor plugin which allows for collaborative document editing. The proposal abstract can be found at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/kde/appinfo.html?csaid=9433F3446323A693.
The goal of this project is to bring in editor collaboration to KDE. This will allow users to share document trees and watch remote modifications made to them in real time. More so, in order to do this users will no longer have look outside of the editor or IDE. While I have had this project in mind it is amazing how many times I wish I had an editor with the ability to do this, mostly while sitting at a cafe trying to help out someone with a piece of code. This alone has me very excited to get this project working.
Luckily, a very powerful library for all the backend work exists, libinfinity (git://git.0×539.de/git/infinote.git). This library handles all the network communication and security, synchronization, and document hosting, while providing me with a nice TextBuffer interface to glue my plugin to. Writing this plugin will be the meat of my work this summer. Aside from that, I will be adding some nifty client-side features such as document re-visioning, and hopefully adding user access control to the library.
For now, I’m left trying to clear off my plate as much as possible before schools end so I can really devote a couple months to developing an open source project. 
