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Fri, 17 Mar 2006

Gobby - collaborative editing and group projects

I have two classes this semester both of which involve group projects. Since the members of my groups are spread out across the MassBay area and we all have very different schedules, it's been hard to come together in one central place to do group work and have meetings and such. No one else in the group has done any open source or decentralized development, so that's adding to the complexities. On top of that, we've got a couple of different operating systems involved.

We started doing meetings and document-editing together using Gobby. It has some minor syntax highlighting that helps, but more importantly, it allows us to talk using an irc-like pane on the bottom while editing a series of documents together in real time.

One of the problems I'm having with it is that I want to add Scheme syntax highlighting (not that there's much in the way of "syntax" in Scheme). I can't figure out where it would go, though. It's either handled by one of the libraries that Gobby uses or it's somewhere in the code and I just haven't found it yet.

The other problem I'm having is that it only allows you to edit text-based documents. I do realize that anything else would be wildly difficult. Still, it'd be nice to be able to "share" other artifacts other than text-based documents even if we couldn't all edit them. Right now we're iterating over other files by checking them into CVS and doing CVS update and also just sending things around by email.

Anyhow, it's definitely been really useful.

[ tags: software | category: /content | Permalink | View/Add Comments: 4 ]

Comments:

Posted by Jeff Kowalczyk on Fri Mar 17 17:57:00 2006
Two tools that come to mind would be a Plone portal, for sharing content, and inkboard, a collaborative whiteboard for inkscape SVG graphics editor.


Posted by Juhaz on Fri Mar 17 23:25:24 2006
The syntax highlighting is indeed handled by one of the libraries, gtksourceview.

The relevant files are usually in /usr/share/gtksourceview-1.0/language-specs/

It's the same library that is used by gedit, so googling for gedit and syntax or highlighting etc might be helpful if there's something you can't figure out. And someone might've already written a scheme file.


Posted by Fredrik on Sat Mar 18 02:50:04 2006
seems like it is using gtksourceview, which most probably would be the place for syntax highlighting addidtions


Posted by Michael Dillon on Sat Mar 18 19:42:28 2006
It's a shame that systems like Teamwave seem to have been completely forgotten in only a few short years. Perhaps this is because developers don't know how to use Internet tools (like citeseer) to research a topic before they start coding. Read this to see what Teamwave could do http://www.markroseman.com/teamwave/workplace.html

Click on the last of the three screenshots to see shared images and other shared graphical content. I downloaded this system back in 1996 and ran some trials between systems including one which was networked over a 56k modem link. It was still good enough to do collaboration because of the way Teamwave sent TCL code objects rather than bitmaps.

Of course, Open Croquet is the cadillac of this type of collaborative system. http://www.opencroquet.org/

Even though the systems I mention are written in TCL and Smalltalk, there is no reason that someone couldn't implement most of this in Python. In fact, someone in Mexico adapted the LEO Outline editor to do this (LeoN Leo over Network)
http://ryalias.freezope.org/souvenirs


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