Groove?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Porter Woodward" <[woodward--shore--net]> To: <[rebol-list--rebol--com]> Sent: Friday, May 11, 2001 7:22 PM Subject: [REBOL] Groove?

> Hey - > > Please, everyone who is able - take a look at: > > http://www.groove.net/

I've been using Groove the application for about 6 months and find it invaluable to collaborate on projects with small teams. It's file sharing, chat, security and replication are so brain-dead simple that I've gotten many diverse groups and running very faster than you could spell Intranet. Thus inspired, I looked more into Groove the platform for P2P app delivery. Specifically, I looked into trying to write some code that would ride on top of their APIs so that I could deliver a better photo-sharing app to end-users. It wasn't a very straightforward process, and non-crossplatform COM is a major turn-off. A very approachable compromise would be to use Groove's file sharing to distribute Rebol scripts with embedded data. I started prototyping something like this to deliver a photo-browsing View application, embedding JPGs into my REBOL files (so I didn't have to deal with Groove's storage API). As much as I would like the architectural cleanliness of a REBOL-only solution, using Groove to bootstrap a subset of Link functionality was pretty attractive. I think under this scenario you'd only be on the hook for the View run-time licenses. Since it's not really clear how Groove will treat either small developers or alternate platforms in terms of pricing, licensing and development roadmap, I would hesitate to code anything that relies any more heavily on that platform. JS [johnseq--pobox--com] http://www.pobox.com/~johnseq 5/11/01 1:22:51 PM, Porter Woodward <[woodward--shore--net]> wrote:

Porter, Yes, very familiar with it for many months... We were not that impressed, but then we are hard to impress. However, I do like Groove's marketing message, and it takes more than one company to make a market. They will help open a lot of minds. I think of REBOL as a lightweight & quicker approach to what Groove spent $50 million doing. That is, we could write Groove in REBOL in a couple months, but you could not write REBOL in Groove any time soon. REBOL is a true distributed computing platform, it is a powerful next generation architecture, where Groove is essentially a stack of COM and XML plug-ins that only run under Windows. Currently, REBOL/View runs on 26 platforms other than Windows. (This is important because so much of the back end of the Internet does not run on windows... and DC needs to run on both sides of the wire, not just on the client.) But I agree... Groove does have a slick UI.... and I'm hoping that perhaps a few folks on this email list may get inspired to knock out a version of it for REBOL. I think that would be very cool... and I think it could be done by an expert REBOLer in a couple weeks, at least for the GUI side of it. For the back end, we've already created it... It's called REBOL/Express. In summary, REBOL's vision is much broader and deeper than Groove. We have created a true technological advancement that will lead to a brighter future for distributed Internet applications. In fact, our vision is similar to that of the original Web... except that we seek a world of open inter-operability of distributed applications rather than just the distribution of document pages. So, I think I'm in total agreement with the spirit of your email. Let's see what we can do as a group to create an "Open Groove" written entirely in REBOL! Great idea, Porter. Let's go for it! -Carl Sassenrath Founder & CTO REBOL Technologies At 5/11/01 01:22 PM -0400, you wrote:

On Fri, 11 May 2001, Carl Sassenrath wrote:

> I think of REBOL as a lightweight & quicker approach to what Groove > spent $50 million doing. That is, we could write Groove in REBOL > windows... and DC needs to run on both sides of the wire, not just > on the client.)

> But I agree... > Groove does have a slick UI.... and I'm hoping that perhaps a few > for the GUI side of it. For the back end, we've already created > it... It's called REBOL/Express.

> So, I think I'm in total agreement with the spirit of your email. > Let's see what we can do as a group to create an "Open Groove" > written entirely in REBOL! Great idea, Porter.

Hi-- I've just read some posts about Groove and I figured I'd add my own $.02. My initial impression of Groove was great. The UI looks really slick, plus it was neat that I didn't have to do anything to start using it; no proxy or network configuration was required. It's also clever the way they use e-mail as a way to virally attract (invite) new users. After a few sessions of using Groove, the novelty began to wear off. Although it appears to be slick, the UI can be confusing and clunky at times. Some tools add new layers of tabs often with the duplicate labels. Probably most disappointing was the sluggishness of the application. Chat really didn't feel like chat because of the excessive network latency. This didn't make sense to me, because I could chat with these same people using REBOL/Express and responses registered within 2 seconds. Your milage may vary, but I found many of the apps plagued by slow UI interaction. In a nutshell, Groove alone isn't a killer app. It's a platform (that's better than many) that's looking for a killer app. //Ed --- Porter Woodward <[woodward--shore--net]> wrote:

On Fri, 11 May 2001, Ed O'Connor wrote:

> After a few sessions of using Groove, the novelty > began to wear off. Although it appears to be slick, > the UI can be confusing and clunky at times. Some > tools add new layers of tabs often with the duplicate > labels.

> Probably most disappointing was the sluggishness of > the application. Chat really didn't feel like chat > within 2 seconds. Your milage may vary, but I found > many of the apps plagued by slow UI interaction.

> In a nutshell, Groove alone isn't a killer app. It's a > platform (that's better than many) that's looking for > a killer app.

Hey - I'm sure some of you are already on the loop on this. But, have you all had a chance to check out Groove? While it is Windows only (right now) I would urge you all to try and take a look. Groove software lets you create secure shared spaces wher you make instant and direct online connections with others to share information and get things done... The Groove client and platform reside securely on the individual's PC, not on a Web site or server, giving users control over how, when and with whom they interact. The Groove client includes tools for voice, and text-based communications, file sharing, and many other interactive activities, while the Groove platform supports standard development languages, built in security and an XML code base, making it easy to build additional tools as needed... In short, it's pretty slick. The entirety of a shared space (all files, messages, pictures, sketchpads, notepads, outlines, etc) resides on the hard-disk of every participant of the shared space. It is secure both on-the-wire and on-disk (ie. encrypted). It uses the exchange of public keys to enable secure, instant messaging - as well as the exchange of changes to the shared space. I have the sneaking suspicion that one could do some of this with Rebol/View/Pro (encryption is a must). Groove is currently based on COM - which despite their developer docs to the contrary - is still pretty much a Windows only technology. Almost all of the "tools" in a space are built around standard COM objects, or around the framework of COM objects that Groove provides. So - like I said, some of this sort of thing could certainly be done with Rebol/View/Pro; even more could be done if you simply leveraged the COM objects they already provide - but then you would loose most of the cross-platform capability that Rebol provides. Please, everyone who is able - take a look at: http://www.groove.net/ - Porter Woodward