Topic: EtherCalc spreadsheets

[Charles2008]

https://ethercalc.org/

Has anyone had any experience with this on SME?

Apparently it's a development of WikiCalc -> SocialCalc -> EtherCalc

Of course Google Docts dominates this space, but It looks to me that EtherCalc might be a more powerful editable web-spreadsheet solution than the more normal plugins for Wordpress, Wiki's and CMS's.



For the more interested, my cursory trawl of non-Google Docts web-spreadsheets have turned up:
http://visop-dev.com/Project+jQuery.sheet   ...   jQuery.sheet. (TWiki plugin)
http://www.zkoss.org/product/zkspreadsheet   ...   ZKspreadsheet
http://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxSpreadsheet/   ...  dhtmlx Spreadsheet (Wordpress plugin)
http://www.gelsheet.org/   ...   Gelsheet (Wordpress, Joomla plugin)

[mmccarn]

I was able to install ethercalc on my SME 8.1 server with little difficulty -- but then I already have NodeJS installed for etherpad-lite.

Once NodeJS is installed, I installed ethercalc using:

Code: [Select]

yum --enablerepo=epel install redis
npm install -g ethercalc
Ethercalc can then be started from the command line and accessed from the local network at http://smeserver.tld:8000
# ethercalc

I created a proxypass domain named ethercalc.smeserver.tld pointing to 127.0.0.1:8000 then made the mods required to restart redis at reboot and make ethercalc a supervised process.

[stephdl]

would it be possible to write some wiki pages on this topic(etherpad/ethercalc), this could be really interesting

[guest22]

It could also be really 'messy', for we need to deal with node.js, npm, redis.

Pretty all new grounds for most of us, and a huge pile of dependencies are being installed as a requirement.

Not blocking, just saying. And, again, Docker comes to mind.

guest

[mmccarn]

would it be possible to write some wiki pages on this topic(etherpad/ethercalc), this could be really interesting

Yes, but not for a couple weeks.

It could also be really 'messy', for we need to deal with node.js, npm, redis.

Pretty bad on SME 8 (gcc needed to compile nodejs 2.6+).  Not so bad on SME 9 (configure epel repo, yum install, create startup scripts)

... And, again, Docker comes to mind.

Docker does look extremely exciting.  I noticed that Audrey T offers docker images for both redis and ethercalc:

Or install with our Docker image, which comes with a built-in Redis server and webworker-threads support:

# Runs at port 6967
sudo docker run -d -p 6967:6967 -v /var/lib/redis:/redis:rw audreyt/ethercalc

# Runs at another port, for example 8080
sudo docker run -d -p 8080:6967 -v /var/lib/redis:/redis:rw audreyt/ethercalc

Note the use of -v flag to store the Redis database in /var/lib/redis on the host server. In Docker versions 0.4.x, the flag was called -b instead.

[guest22]

@charles2008, so no hijacking intended

@mmccarn
Maybe ethercalc and etherpad are good proof of concept cases for running docker containers on SME Sever. Especially the -v option mentioned above wher the localhost (SME Server) is being used for storage, so data is available for usage/backup the SME Server way independently from a Docker container. Same for Docker apps that use MySQL.

I've put some info together here: http://wiki.contribs.org/Docker

[Charles2008]

@HF - no problem. I am very interested in your comments, as I am sure others are.

@mmccarn - I had assumed, having quickly read your NodeJS page, that EtherCalc was only going to be (possibly??) straightforward on SME9.
http://wiki.contribs.org/NodeJS

I haven't yet had time to try to install EtherCalc myself on SME9, but have played with the demo and like it.

I have just had a quick look at the etherpad that you mention and recognise what a powerful tool this is - true real-time collaboration.
http://etherpad.org/

[guest22]

http://wiki.contribs.org/NodeJS

Just updated that wiki page a bit for readability.

[guest22]

Just to let you know that there is focus on Software Collections for SME Server 9.x (64-bit only) . In this respect Nodejs is one of those applications. Please see http://wiki.contribs.org/Software_collections. Still all a WIP.

guest