Yes, the SoC is over :(
The different aims written in the initial draft of the project have been achieved except to do more prototypes using the comet implementation
Luckily the project doesnt end here. My supervisor Vlado and I have a lot of ideas to add and improve the collaborative edition in drupal. This SoC has been the perfect starting point and the collaborative editors and development in this field is still scarce on internet. Therefore it will be great continue such development
Many points listed in the initial specification have had to be changed when we had to find the means or the technical resources to implement them. For example, in order to follow the xhtml strict specification (as drupal does) we decided to use textareas instead of iframes (as tinymce does). Using textareas we are not able to implement rich text edition immediatly but it never was an initial aim
The diff algorithm to detect the client changes, how to insert the response text in a non obtrusive way, the use cases performance on server side and every aspect described in the groups have been implemented and remain open for future improvements. Each one of these aspects have its own mini "to do" list. There is also an alternative technology for each one of them that can be debated to find the pros and cons of the current implementation
My first future "to do" list is to create the ui elements to hightlight other's changes, replace the current DOM functions with the jQuery syntax (it does make sense since more than the 50 per cent of the project code is js) and to do the collaborative editor even more generic towards an API like module
I want to express how proud i am to choose drupal as engine to develop the idea of collaborative edition three months ago. Now that i know the drupal technology even better there are a couple of module ideas that could be implemented in the very next future
Finally, i want to thank the inestimable support of my supervisor Vlado with whom i hope to count on him to continue developing the collaborative editor and any other future project that can cross my mind (i recommend you to read his post about macros in php and give him feedback). I'd also like to thank all google team specially to Leslie Hawthorn (LH) who i was lucky to meet in Barcelona two months ago
Ernest