FLEx Bridge is an application that allows multiple FieldWorks 7.0 users to do remote collaboration (i.e., not necessarily connected by a local network).

The FLEx Bridge application is similar to Lift Bridge in that both use Chorus to do the "heavy lifting" of the collaboration work. The FLEx Bridge application is different from Lift Bridge in that FLEx Bridge aims to support remote collaboration of the full FLEx data model, while Lift Bridge is focused on dictionary collaboration and uses a LIFT file.

Status¶

FLEx Bridge (Windows) is under active development, and we hope it will be released in FieldWorks 7.3 (no date yet).

FLEx Bridge (Linux) is built at the same time as its Windows counterpart, but has not been tested at this point.

My wife and I (Randy) have been using a very preliminary version of FLEx Bridge for nearly two years now, but it lacked a lot for it to be more widely usable. Those lacking areas are now being filled in.

Developers¶

Mailing List¶

Sign up here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/flexbridgedev

Source Code¶

FLEx Bridge is written in c#. The UI widgets uses Windows Forms from the Chorus library.

To get the source code, you'll need Mercurial. Windows users, install TortoiseHg. Then from a command line, go to where you keep your development projects, and give this command:

hg clone http://hg.palaso.org/fwbridge

You should now have a solution which you can build using any 2010 edition of Visual Studio 2010, including the free Express version.

Getting up-to-date libraries¶

Some of the dependencies are very large, and others are updated frequently. For both of those reasons, you can't just pull the code and expect it to compile. First, you will have to do some extra work to get Lift Bridge's library dependencies up to date.

1) Palaso Libraries

Get binaries of Palaso libraries from http://build.palaso.org/repository/downloadAll/bt32/.lastSuccessful/artifacts.zip. This is really the latest, so don't be disheartened if there's some API change which Lift Bridge hasn't updated to yet. We keep them in sync generally, but a few times a year they may be out of sync by a day or so.

Using the contents of the zip, update the palaso libraries in lib/Debug and lib/Release.

2) Chorus Libraries

Get binaries of Chorus libraries from http://build.palaso.org/repository/downloadAll/bt2/14146:id/artifacts.zip. This is really the latest, so don't be disheartened if there's some API change which Lift Bridge hasn't updated to yet. We keep them in sync generally, but a few times a year they may be out of sync by a day or so.

Using the contents of the zip, update the Chorus libraries in lib/Debug and lib/Release.