Real-time collaborative coding in a web IDE
Author(s)
Goldman, Max; Little, Danny Greg; Miller, Robert C.
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This paper describes Collabode, a web-based Java integrated development environment designed to support close, synchronous collaboration between programmers. We examine the problem of collaborative coding in the face of program compilation errors introduced by other users which make collaboration more difficult, and describe an algorithm for error-mediated integration of program code. Concurrent editors see the text of changes made by collaborators, but the errors reported in their view are based only on their own changes. Editors may run the program at any time, using only error-free edits supplied so far, and ignoring incomplete or otherwise error-generating changes. We evaluate this algorithm and interface on recorded data from previous pilot experiments with Collabode, and via a user study with student and professional programmers. We conclude that it offers appreciable benefits over naive continuous synchronization without regard to errors and over manual version control.
Date issued
2011-10Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '11)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Max Goldman, Greg Little, and Robert C. Miller. 2011. Real-time collaborative coding in a web IDE. In Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 155-164. DOI=10.1145/2047196.2047215 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2047196.2047215
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISBN
978-1-4503-0716-1