[Idle-dev] Looking over someone's shoulder

[Steve Morris]

Martijn Faassen writes:
 > Hi there,
 > It would therefore be very nice if IDLE had somekind of facility to
 > connect to some other IDLE elsewhere on the net, and synchronize the
 > contents of a window with it. I don't much care if they're constant
 > updates or if some 'send' button needs to be pressed; perhaps both
 > options could be supplied. 
 > 
 > This way I can look over the shoulders of students while they're experimenting
 > with Python code, even though said students are in the US and I'm in Europe.
 > It would be even nicer if I could go in and change their code for them. 

I think this is a good general idea, sort of like the trainer yoke in
an airplane. I can imaging a remote teacher jumping from desktop to
desktop of their remote students. If you allowed multiple connections
this would let multiple students to watch the teachers machine.

However there are currently available solutions that solve this
problem in a more general way so maybe it shouldn't be in Idle
directly. I am specifically thinking of VNC. This is a protocol that
allows viewing and controlling one desktop from another. It requires a
server to be running on the system with the desktop. Then the virtual
desktop can be viewed and operated from any other machine, i.e. a Mac
desktop can be viewed from a UNIX machine, a UNIX X11 session can be
viewed from a Palm Pilot etc. Multiple viewers can also look at the
same desktop.

I am surprised that VNC doesn't seem to get much use in the education
world. It is sourceware under the GNU license and viewers are
available on almost any conceivable platform, including palmtops.
Servers are less common but they cover all the major platforms.

The downside is that it is slower than X11 and the like because it is
purely bit oriented. On a slow connection it is quite painful. A lot
of work is done to compress updates and narrow them down to only
required ones but this only takes you so far. Still I find it useful
to connect to my home system occasionally.

If you want to check it out the home web site is:

http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/index.html

A personal note:

When I installed it I couldn't resist the test of letting two desktops
look at each other, sort of like letting two mirrors face each
other. It was unbelievably slow but it worked as long as I hade the
patience to wait. I suppose it would have stopped when the included
images of included images dropped off the screen (the window border
causes an offset every pass) but that would have taken too long with
my slow connection. I was impressed.