Link IDE : A Real Time Collaborative Development Environment

While working on large scale development projects all software engineers find themselves, at some point, working with a source control system in order to add or re-vert changes to code. With software projects involving a multitude of programmers this is a crucial part of successful development. When working on a smaller project howev-er, with a tight knit group, setting up and dealing with such a system can become more work than it is worth. To solve this problem a real time collaborative integrated devel-opment environment could be used. The IDE’s focus would be on providing a collabora-tive setting for programming teams or pair programming by taking advantage of real time text editing, the ability to build and run code, chat, and various other team and task oriented features. Instead of running into code conflicts at check-in time, users would be able to see conflicts appearing in real-time. This would allow small programming teams to bypass source control, avoid wasting time, and spend more time collaborating. Real time text editing has recently become popular with its appearance in Google Docs. There are a number of open source applications that support real time text editing. Real time editing by multiple users allows not only for excellent collaborative programming but can also be very effective in teaching sessions of programming. Other features such as chatting and task lists would also help to create a fully immersive and organized col-laborative environment where users do not need outside tools in order to collaborate