Abstract
Real-time collaborative programming supports a group of programmers to edit shared source code concurrently across geographically-distributed sites and collaborate in a closely-coupled fashion. There exists a number of problems and limitations for this emerging approach to be applied in real-world scenarios, and two critical issues are the lack of support on cross-platform collaboration and multi-level consistency maintenance. In this study, we have proposed, designed and implemented a novel Cross-Platform Real-time Collaborative Framework (CP-ROOF), and meanwhile achieved conflict resolution of multi-level editing operations. Based on the proposed framework, we have successfully implemented two collaboration clients that have realized cross-platform real-time collaboration over Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, two of the most popular Java programming environments. In this paper, we present design objectives and rationales, workflow and functional design, CP-ROOF’s architecture and components, and major technical issues and solutions. Preliminary user evaluations and performance experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of the framework and the satisfactory performance of the prototype systems in a wide range of scenarios.
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Acknowledgment
This study has been sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62172301, No. 61772371, No. 62173248, No. 62073245, and No. 61702374), the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (No. 21ZR1465100), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.
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Ma, Y. et al. (2021). Supporting Cross-Platform Real-Time Collaborative Programming: Architecture, Techniques, and Prototype System. 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_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92638-0_8
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