get started with Etherpad lite

[jia zhu]

hi Everyone, not sure if this is the proper place to post but i am new to Etherpad and I've been doing some research on it already. I downloaded the files and run it on my localhost, it looked fantastic.
Now I want to integrate etherpad into my project. and i am confused how this should be done. My project is in C# and run in Visual Studio, the DB we are using is MS-SqlServer. what I did, I embedded a DotNet WebServer control and etherpad shown up fine and immediately we are getting the functionalties. but in order to customize it i need to understand how it worked under the hook and need to modify the source code to fit our needs.... so several questions:
1. how easy can I integrate Etherpad into a C# project? is there a way to load Etherpad source code into Visual Studio?
2. What language should I know if i want to make changes to Etherpad source code? Can this be done under Windows OS?
3. how easy is it to hook up Etherpad with a MS-SqlServer DB? And how?
4. is this the proper place to have a forum like peer-to-peer discussion? if not is there an etherpad forum?

thank you for you time...
Jia

[jhollinger]

Are you talking about Etherpad Lite (https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite)? If so, it is written entirely in JavaScript (Node.js). For integration, it has an HTTP JSON API, and I believe there is a .NET client https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite/wiki/HTTP-API-client-libraries. Looks a little outdated, but it should still work.

[jia zhu]

thanks for the reply. i was able to download the .net client and connect to the server to retrieve the data.

i am still not clear how the underlying communication with the DB works. also i want to know if the connection to the MS-SQL can be done instead of MySQL. is there a tutorial for that? thanks!