The NetBeans Collaboration Project
Need to discuss code with other developers remotely? Want to conduct
a code review but your team is distributed across continents? With
Developer Collaboration, you can do both and intuitively at that!
The Developer Collaboration feature in NetBeans IDE allows you to connect to a collaboration server.
With this feature, you can engage with other developers, in either
private or public conversations, wherever they are located in the next
room or across the continent using the familiar chat capabilities that
you are used to.
The chat capabilities provide the added benefit of being able to
"talk" code, which is sent and received with all appropriate formatting
in place. As the figure to the right shows, you can send messages in
plain text, XML, HTML, or Java code format. The message composition
window is a full-fledged source editor with all of the code-completion
features in place.
Share projects and files in real time, allowing others in the
conversation to make changes, which are represented to the rest of the
group in visual cues.
News
- Set up a collaboration server or select existing one.
- Install the modules
in the NetBeans IDE.
- Connect to a collaboration server.
- See
what you can do with Developer Collaboration (a flash demo).
- Chat! Share! Collaborate!
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Developer Collaboration User Interface
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The Project
The Netbeans Collaboration project provides a framework for
developing collaboration-aware applications that can leverage features
based on various low-level communication technologies and protocols
such as XMPP, JXTA, SIP, etc. The Framework enables the development of
applications using a client-agnositc, XML messaging protocol called
MOXC (pronounced as “moxie”) that masks the disparities between various
lower-level protocols. Any application can potentially send and receive
these XML messages in order to inter-collaborate. While the MOXC
protocol is not tied to the Netbeans platform necessarily or even Java
technology, the project will provide an open source Java implementation
of the protocol. In addition, the framework also facilitates
development of higher-level collaboration features, such as chat,
filesharing, etc, that can be used to collaboration-enable applications
built on the Netbeans platform as well as those that are not.
The goals of this project were:
- to develop a client-agnostic, XML messaging protocol and provide
a
Java-based open source implementation of the protocol,
- to provide a rich, flexible and secure framework for building
collaboration-aware Java applications based on the Netbeans platform as
well as those independent of Netbeans,
- to deliver implementations of providers for lower-level
communication
protocols (XMPP, JXTA, SIP, etc) as well as higher-level collaboration
feature modules within the framework.
The basis of NetBeans Collaboration project were components from Sun
Java Studio Enterprise and Sun Java System Instant Messaging products.
