Collaborative Methods

By now I’m sure many of you have read Sean Corfield‘s post over at the ArgumentCollection, detailing what Broadchoice is building, and how they’re building it. I’m not going to spend time describing it – the post covers it much better than I could – but I’m always excited to read stuff like this :

So what makes all of this tick? Front and central is the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and Flex providing a rich desktop experience. Communication with the server is provided by Adobe’s open source remoting and messaging technology, BlazeDS, with the rest of the server stack completed by Groovy, Java, Spring and Hibernate. The real-time communication aspects of the Workspace are provided through Cocomo and Adobe’s Hosted Services. We’re very excited about the possibilities afforded us by Cocomo: audio/video conferencing, chat, presence, real-time collaboration on documents and so on.

BlazeDS, AIR, Flex, and Cocomo – definitely seems like a great foundation.

A little link-pumping to sum up :

• Interested in using Cocomo? Check out the MAX sessions – we’ve got a lot planned for November .
• Interested in helping build Cocomo? We have an open position for a Flex Ninja. Could it be you?

cheers!

It’s really been a wild month for us on the Cocomo team. First, on June 2, a little project called Acrobat.com went live. I got to get up early to watch logs as the East Coast woke up, read about us, and started using ConnectNow. Watching a service you helped design handle its first big test is exhilarating and terrifying, but we managed to fumble through pretty durn well, actually.

Today is another milestone for Cocomo – our second *real* application (not dissing YahooMaps or YouTube Livingrooms, just saying) goes live today. From here on out, every PDF file created in Acrobat 9 will have the potential to use “Collaborate Live”. If enabled, anyone who opens the PDF can log in, and get real-time presence, chat, and the ability to co-navigate the pdf, with anyone else who has that PDF open.

Check out a video here (sorry for the browser resize!), and a feature overview here.

Essentially, Acrobat uses a Flex app embedded in its chrome to connect to our Cocomo service, and uses a sharedModel in order to keep the view of the document in sync. No server code needed, and the service is always-on, with nothing for the Acrobat development team to maintain.

Obviously, Acrobat is a pretty big deal, so I’m up again at 6am PST to watch the East Coast start using the feature. I’m really excited to watch the work we’ve done getting used in multiple products across the company. Which one will be next?

Stay tuned; we’re still doing a lot of work, with an eye towards opening this platform up to even more developers.

I am indeed a sucker for the ‘mashups’. And YouTube lets us put their player in our Flex apps. See where this is going? The basic idea here is… watch YouTube together, chat, and annotate your fave videos. Together.

Try it out!

Just search using the panel on top, and whatever vid you select will be watched by everyone. Scrubbing and play/pause is also synched up. All this through a simple Cocomo sharedModel – to be clear, we’re not streaming the videos, just the videoID, so that each person in the room can go fetch it themselves from YouTube.

This has actually been up live for over a month, and could really stand some improvement, but I’m already slammed with real work to do, and can’t afford any more time to spruce it up. Apologies for any RTEs you might hit =). A few features I’d like to see – all totally doable with Cocomo today, just suffering from a lack of spare time :

Video History – a shared history of which videos have been watched, and who chose them. This way when people watch American Idol, I can shame them .

Just a quick update – the shared yahoo maps example (co-navigate a map, leave a marker, real-time whiteboarding over the map) has done pretty well, except for a user-limit issue that we spotted on wednesday. It’s fixed now, so more than 3 people should be allowed in at a time. The results from the last posting were pretty cool, with markers from pretty much everywhere (except South America and Africa, where are you guys?)

Unfortunately, I had to clear all the old markers in the room . So get back in there, especially if you couldn’t get in last time, and make your mark on the world!

I admit it, I’m a sucker for maps. I’m the kind of person who can stare at a map forever. So, when I spotted Ted’s post on the new Yahoo Maps AS3 component release, I kinda freaked out a little. Then, I got to work. About 10 hours later, we have real-time shared maps, with co-navigation, shared cursors, and annotation overlays supplied by the mighty Cocomo components.

Try The App Here

There are a couple of issues left to fix, and a thousand ideas on how I could make this cooler, but my demo-coding-time runneth short right now. Also, note I’m only allowed 50000 tile-hits a day, so if tons of people show, it might die an unseemly death.

Let me know what you think I’ve got some more demos in the oven, stay tuned!

So, we’ve just shipped BRIO beta, and I wish I could say we’ve taken some time to relax; but we haven’t. One of the great/horrible things about Hosted Services is that as bugs come in, we can fix them right away and redeploy… So keep the bug reports / suggestion coming, and we’ll keep plugging away.

We did take time to read through the reviews out there, of course. We’ve always kept our eye on Robin Good‘s input, as he’s got as much experience analyzing and reviewing Collaborative apps as anyone out there. Check out his very detailed review :

Robin Good BRIO beta review

One thing that caught my eye (besides “There is no other competitor in this marketplace that offers this much for this little”, or “Brio is a breakthrough web conferencing solution“) is his call-out of the whiteboard functionality. I’d love to hear more of his thoughts on this, and would suggest he apply for a Cocomo private beta account – the whiteboard is built for extensibility, so that any Flex developer should be able to make new tools for it. I would love for someone motivated to add tools to join up

Second item for today : Peldi took some time to go through the BRIO source code and come up with a few statistics. The 2 things he was interested in :

1) How much of BRIO are we shipping as part of the reusable Cocomo Flex SDK?
2) How much of BRIO was built on the server, and how much on the client?

Check out this pair of graphs for the results :

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised by just how far we’ve come. Consider that the server code in question will be the same services provided for every Cocomo app, and you get a sense of what we’re trying to do here – Apps on the client (built on our Cocomo Flex SDK), Services on the server.

It’s been about a year and 4 months since we started prototyping the basics of Cocomo – establishing a Session with the services, and working on a new approach to real-time messaging that would accomplish 2 goals :

1) Be robust enough to handle all of the needs of a complex app like Breeze/Connect.
2) Be designed in such a way that an ENTIRE MEETING application could be written COMPLETELY on the client, using a generic set of “real-time collaboration” services on the backend.

Well, we’re proud to announce that the goals have been met – the results are Cocomo (our client-server framework for real-time collaboration, which, go listen to me ramble here, if you want more details), and what we’re unveiling today – codenamed BRIO.

(click to see this a little bigger)

BRIO is the beta codename next generation of Connect/Breeze. It’s also FREE, for up to 3 people in a room at once.

Getcherself a BRIO Room here!

The great thing from my perspective is that we’ve really taken the time to validate the framework here, and really executed on the concept – our Cocomo server framework is now deployed and public-facing, and will (soon, soon!) provide the same backend services for applications that any Flex developer can use in their own applications. You did know that there’s a private beta for the Cocomo Flex components about to start, didn’t you?

So, the previous post’s Cocomo Shared Whiteboard test went pretty well, albeit with a couple of issues.

I think I’ve got everything on the server (it’s a very, very mini version of the service we’re going to be hosting for everyone) sorted out now – I had a bunch of comments left in the previous post telling me there was nothing but gray for the app.

Others, like William Overington in England, took some cool snapshots – I liked the chaos here :

For all you debug-player enabled folks out there, if you spot RTEs, please copy paste them into the comments. You help is much appreciated.

Now, Go Draw!

I decided to have a little fun this Friday afternoon, and throw out a little Cocomo App for public use. Thought it might be cool to get something out there to show that this is for realz…

Yeah, it’s crazy-buggy, and it’s not the prettiest it could be, but I didn’t have time to make a decent stylesheet. Also of note is the fact that everyone on this alpha box is Swedish. No, I don’t know why either, ask Peldi. Sorry about the screwed up blog formatting – hit permalink to see the full thing properly.

… In case you were curious, here’s a snapshot of THE CODE FOR THE ENTIRE APP ….