Wednesday, 6 January 2010

[To Code]: Add Etherpad capability to allow realtime O2 XRules Support

Etherpad has an amazing real-time editing and history-viewing interface that would be really handy to add to O2 since it would allow for real time support to O2 XRules.

The idea would be for two (or more) XRules users to swap the EtherPad address and be able to compile and execute an XRule (or UnitTests) locally with code from an remote EtherPad pad

For example:

The only missing piece is to add to O2's XRules the capability to go to that page, grab the source code, compile it and execute it!  (Shouldn't be that hard since all the required building blocks are already in O2)


This also has quite a lot of security implications, since we don't want to execute malicious code :)

Ideally what we need is:

  • Trusted host for etherpads
  • Download the code via SSL (or other encrypted method (maybe using PKI or shared Keys)
  • Compile code
  • Run a scan on the code before execution
  • Execute code under a .NET Sandbox

References: