Hi guys, This idea about realtime non-invasive notifications of others activity in the group is actually interesting and quite close what we are seeing in realtime web apps recently. I namelly see the Facebook-like business collaboration as a growing trend and one of more interesting innovations there is how to get notified without being disturbed, non-invasive therefore. I think we can copy some ideas from there to our tools too. Janko S, Göran Krampe piše:
- Real time collaboration. If we can sit in a shared (in some controlled fashion) development environment in some kind of real time model, then lots of merging and conflicts would just say PUFF and go up in smoke. We are beginning to see this now with the new IDEs running "on the web" because suddenly it gets very natural to experiment in that direction.
Real-time collaboration in the sense of getting code updates from other developers immediatedly is probably not very helpful, as it would distract a lot.
Code changes is one thing you probably want to *control* (which is why I wrote "in some controlled fashion") but some examples of stuff you really would like to get "immediately" are:
- Developer X is modifying "your" code. No, not committed yet - but perhaps you should talk to X :)
- Visual queue/notification that developer X just managed to break your unit tests
- Developer X is right now writing new code that references classes that you in turn have modified in your uncommitted code... or sending messages whose implementations you in turn have modified in your uncommitted code.
...and so on, there are numerous "tell tales" that there will be interesting issues down the road - and these signals could be exposed to the developers in various ways. Open your mind - it is not all about sharing commits of code :)
-- Janko Mivšek Aida/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server http://www.aidaweb.si