I want to use EtherPad (or a clone). My site is running Ruby on Rails. API or local install?

Question

I'd like to utilize an etherpad interface on my website. Two questions:

1) is there any site with an etherpad api that I could just call remotely? 2) if not, how much trouble is it to install scala and have the two run concurrently?

Thanks

Answer 1

Installing scala might mean a few things:

• Installing the SDK (i.e. scalac)
• Installing the runtime

Assuming you mean the runtime, scala runs entirely on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) so assuming you have 1.5+ JVM installed, you can run scala programs on it easily (Scala just compiles down to bytecode, after all). All a scala program requires is a few JARs on the classpath (scala-library and scala-compiler)

Answer 2

Check out http://piratepad.net and http://ietherpad.com

And you can embed those etherpad instances using a simple iframe as suggested here: http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/embedding-etherpad

There doesn't seem to be a proper API yet for more robust interactions.

Answer 3

The original etherpad.com has now gone away but at that link there is a list of clones.

The instructions for embedding etherpads seems to have gone away with the rest of etherpad.com but I believe it's as simple as this:

<div id="ep">
<iframe src="http://etherpad.com/foo?fullScreen=1"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;
</div>

Replace "etherpad.com" with whatever clone you're using, "foo" with the name of your pad, and you may or may not want to change that fullScreen=1 to fullScreen=0 (or leave it off altogether).