Abstract
Real-time collaborative programming allows a group of programmers to edit the same source code at the same time. To support semantic conflict prevention in real-time collaboration, a dependency-based automatic locking (DAL) approach was proposed in prior work. The DAL mechanism automatically detects programming elements with dependency relationships, and prohibits concurrent editing on the inter-dependent source code regions by locking. However, the prior DAL scheme is too restrictive, which leads to an unnecessarily large locking scope and seriously impacts the concurrent work. To address this issue, we propose a novel hybrid semantic conflict prevention (HSCP) scheme, to achieve a better balance between conflict prevention and concurrent work. The scheme enforces locking on the working and strongly-depended regions, while applies awareness highlight on weakly-depended regions. The depth of locking scope can be customized by each programmer in a fine-grained manner. A three-level awareness mechanism has been designed for programmers to intuitively distinguish working, strongly-depended and weakly-depended regions. In supporting the scheme, we have devised techniques and solutions, and implemented a prototype that supports programmers to enjoy hybrid semantic conflict prevention in real-time collaborative programming over Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA platforms. Experimental evaluations have confirmed the satisfactory performance of the scheme in complex real-world scenarios.
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Acknowledgment
This study has been sponsored by the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (No. 21ZR1465100), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61772371, No. 62172301, No. 62173248, No. 62073245, and No. 61702374), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.
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Xu, W. et al. (2021). Hybrid Semantic Conflict Prevention in Real-Time Collaborative Programming. In: Gao, H., Wang, X. (eds) Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. CollaborateCom 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 407. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92638-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92638-0_7
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