The Importance of Collaborative Development 61
Eugene Eric Kim writes: "A few months ago, I wrote an essay entitled, "A Manifesto for
Collaborative Tools," outlining a vision for how we can and should be
making collaborative tools more interoperable. The article was
published in the May issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal and is now available
on the web." This manifesto is a good one, particularly if you aren't as a familiar with Doug Engelbart as you should be. There's also some interesting links to learn more about the Semantic Web, and social networks, well worth checking out as well.
If you're interested in Semantic Web software... (Score:5, Informative)
And there are also some tutorials and such-like [semwebcentral.org].
Am I the only one... (Score:2, Offtopic)
When I'm in the 'zone' I can't talk with somebody else, I can't verbalize why I'm writing a code fragment the way I am writing it without gett
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:1, Funny)
Actually, I am a big fan of it, although why am I never paired with some brilliant supermodel?
___________________________
I'm not a
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Insightful)
Did I miss in the article where they said 2 coders on the same computer??? When they talk about colaboration they don't say 2 conders on a computer or people looking over your shoulder.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:1)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh - and you're way off topic, btw. RTFA =)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2, Interesting)
In my experience, if I'm paired with someone good, and either one of us is in the zone, neither of us speaks. It's just a matter of being polite - when I'm not at the wheel I have time to read the code, and try not to talk unless the other programmer is moving on with something obviously unfinished or flawed. It's like a constant code review
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2)
One thing though is that being on a contract I don't really care about this whole thing that much, so if the company is paying for us to pair, why shouldn't we just take advantage of it and relax a bit?
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2, Insightful)
(Score:0, Troll)
Im going to have to agree... this article seemed like yet another big fluffy acedemic rant about what's wrong with computer software these days, without giving ANY practical new ideas.
I mean, look at his roadmap at the end: Be people-centric? Collaborate? Use standards? Keep improving? Is that supposed to be profound? I doubt its even correct!
Its neither necessary nor sufficient for developers to do any of the above and make great software. Is 'C' people-centric? How much GREAT softwar
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2, Interesting)
However, if you pair up two coders who don't have an about equal level of skill, then
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2)
Eigenpolls (Score:4, Informative)
which i call eigenpolls [all-technology.com]
Check it out.
me too,(at the risk of /.ing myself) (Score:3, Informative)
Discourse District [huji.ac.il]
A dynamic repository for community writings, a mirror, mapping the writing community.
(the link above points to an abstract, the link to the system is at the bottom)
basically it is a wiki adaptation [sourceforge.net] with touchgraph [sourceforge.net] interface, that is meant to be a community utilized concept map.
Born out of a need to define the Complexity community, its scope, and the fact that no one person could define it , since everybody
ugh, touchgraph (Score:2)
It pops and jiggles around, thus being incredibly distracting. Aside from not being much of a help to the typical ADD-R afflicted geek type, it wastes a lot of time and space doing so until it "settles" down.
It has no history. No way to go "back". No way to reference the history, with even a list, let alone a tree.
It has no spatial organization (other than essentially "random"
Re:ugh, touchgraph (Score:1)
Like I said , it is WIP, (and probably will keep being.)
History, good idea, easy to implement, didn't occur to me, till you brought it up, can do, definitely on my to do list
spatial organization - also a good idea, but i have'nt decided how it should be, i thought of adding 'gravity', and 'weights' so 'heavier' nodes would tend to be below their parents, pushing the others up or something., i don't know yet
"glue to backgroud" good idea, can do , will think about it.
as for
Re:ugh, touchgraph (Score:2)
Snapping instantly to the final location is probably jarring, but might be ideal in a few cases. It sounds like a configuration option to me, to only display n steps of motion, plus the optio
Re:ugh, touchgraph (Score:1)
Alex Shapiro is
I just modified the code to suit my needs.
what i did write was the attached wiki and the interfaces, both ways
Anyway, there was no cynicism in my previous post.
I am truely thankful for your comments AND the accompannying tone.
I'd gladly trade any amount of politeness for a like amount of truth.
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OT
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It (being truthful at the cost of being polite/PC) would make life a lot more simple most of the time,
and in
Collaborative Work vis a vis locked down (Score:5, Interesting)
I think peering/collaboration is the way to go, but this is becoming increasingly difficult thanks to the lax default permissions that was inside windows (yeah I'm not a windows admin, and the default share was always set at world full access). The knee jerk reaction was to disallow *all* peer/sharing.
I'll probably get ripped and modded to hell for this but I was looking forward to the "hive" type setups that MS was proposing for peering(for work this would be a godsend, I wouldn't do this at home tho). My concern was their security model.
Just how in the hell can this be done when virii explicitly target this functionality? CVS / Subversion is not an answer for business/end users...
B
people-centric (Score:4, Insightful)
Creating applications that are people-centric are key. They can make or break a product. I use an app that has a few bigt bugs but it was designed to be people-centric so I still love it. It was coded horribly, has crashed for some dumb reasons but how it was designed is great. (A note, I am working with the author to iron out those bugs)
comments (Score:3, Interesting)
a whole lot. Especially when you have people
with different skills that are all good coders.
I'm working on a "hobby" project right now, where
we have 1 person that does alot of the major coding
because he is really good with the catagory the
software falls into. Another person codes the
UIs, and I do alot of other work, planning and
support (I coded the network classes for our
project, for example). Things are working quite
well, it's been really nice.
That's All Fine and Good, But... (Score:5, Interesting)
The manifesto makes grand claims about unifying our collaborative language, but totally understates how difficult this is. The problem usually is that we just do not have a solid model of what can and cannot be done, and we likely never will.
The author pointed at SQL as an incredibly important standard for how data is handled. However, relational databases are relatively simple. We know most everything they can do, so we can define it. And, even, with that, databases are not entirely standard. Most databases have their own little features, often not in the standard.
Look at another good example: filesystem structure. Despite how well defined the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is, distros still tend to be non-compliant. It's an incredibly simple system, and we can't even reliably follow it. Is aiming at standardized interfaces between collaborative applications truly reasonable?
Hopefully, a few things can be standardized, as they are recognized as being universally useful. Some basically are. For example, e-mail is e-mail. There's not too much more to it. Maybe we can slowly define those things which we understand and see the importance for, but moving much beyond that is likely infeasible.
Re:That's All Fine and Good, But... (Score:2, Insightful)
But that's the whole point--Now it's simple. When I'm doing something that needs a relational database, I don't have to re-invent one. There might be fiddly details with plumbing and which one to use, but during design, I can draw a relational database box on the whiteboard without worrying too much about what's inside it. If I want to connect a bunch of tables, select what I want, sort them a particular way, it's there.
Re:That's All Fine and Good, But... (Score:2)
Databases have advanced very little with time. Collaboration methods change day-to-day. Sometimes the methods change due to whim, sometimes due to fashion, and sometimes due to technology. Whatever the reason, collaboration methods are hard to nail down reliably.
Re:That's All Fine and Good, But... (Score:3, Informative)
The proposal is at the end of the article, in the "Roadmap for the Future" section [blueoxen.org]...
I question whether you made it that far before deciding to rant.
To Summarize:
Help us to improve MediaWiki (Score:5, Informative)
MediaWiki in particular implements many ideas that were already envisioned by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. It does show backlinks, but perhaps more importantly, it also allows dynamic inclusion of any page in the current development version [wikipedia.org]. For example, you could have a header and footer in your documentation that is the same for every page. What's more, you can add parameters to these templates to dynamically search and replace patterns of text in the template before transcluding it. This will allow us to replace the currently statically hacked Wikipedia infoboxes [wikipedia.org] with dynamically included and parametrized templates, for example. One long term feature that might be worth hacking on top of this would be transclusion of labeled sections from another page, or interwiki transclusion.
Check out the current feature list [wikipedia.org] and the development roadmap [wikipedia.org]. Subscribe to wikitech-l [wikipedia.org] to help us in improving the software. In true wiki spirit, we are fairly liberal at handing out CVS access (over 40 developers with CVS access at present), so please do ask if you want to work on a larger project.
There are many other wiki engines that are worth working on, such as TWiki [twiki.org] and MoinMoin [sourceforge.net]. Their main deficiency, in my opinion, is that they do rely primarily on the traditional wiki link pattern of CamelCase [wikipedia.org], which is nice for geeks but very ugly for everyone else, and also useless for search engines. MediaWiki uses [[free links]] instead, which are harder to type, but look just like normal links to the reader. Still, working on any other wiki engine is a lot better than starting yet another one.
A collaborative tool which is badly needed is a free software clone of SubEthaEdit [codingmonkeys.de]. Combine wikis with real-time editing and the fun really begins. I imagine something like that might be hackable on top of a powerful graphical editor like Kate [kde.org]. For now WebDAV-support for MediaWiki would also be very cool, as Kate/KDE already supports editing WebDAV resources. So many worthwhile hacks, so little time.
This is an area where open source coders can make a big difference while corporations are still bewildered by the fact that open wikis can produce useful content. So please, let's work together on these tools.
Re:Help us to improve MediaWiki (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if a good groupware system integrated an editor into the client and supported a slightly more extensive set of tags, this could result in easy to edit, good-looking documents made collaboratively.
Why are so many open source projects so densely certain that they must imitate proprietary crap?
Re:Help us to improve MediaWiki (Score:1)
In keeping with the true nature of the article, open sourced collaberative works tend to not be associated with the product or actual use of the works, but instead with the hard core users or people who are interesting in helping/developing on their own time. Right now
Re:Help us to improve MediaWiki (Score:1)
http://interwiki.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/wiki.p l ?W ikiGateway
WikiGateway is a library of functions which allows you to act as a client to a wiki website, executing operations like getPage, putPage, and getRecentChanges. WikiGateway translates your requests into the idiosyncratic HTML form interfaces of various popular wiki servers. The wiki which you are accessing doesn't have to know about WikiGateway; it sees you as just another user. Basically, WikiGate
Re:Help us to improve MediaWiki (Score:2)
Buzzsaw (Score:1)
Autodesk Buzzsaw [autodesk.com]
File Systems (Score:3, Informative)
Doing everything via a share would require a massive amount of permission adjustments that users just can't handle easily. Not to mention, file systems are only useful when two users are on the same network. An internet filesystem is simply not practicle enough to use on a daily basis. This may be one place where Internet2 might show us what's possible.
Re:File Systems (Score:2)
If everyone could have an sftp server, this would all be much easier. Just tell a friend or co-worker a password, and things are shared. Presto! Problem solved!
As far as organization when you need to share with multiple people, well there's nothing preventing an sftp server from having multiple repositories and having different
Semantic Web (Score:2)
This morning I was... (Score:4, Funny)
Document Creation Tools Need To Be Fixed (Score:5, Insightful)
I also think that the whole "document as a file" scheme needs to go away. The printed copy needs to have watermarked inside it the version and date it was created / printed. But the document is an ever changing entity that should be accessable and modified but not saved as a file. As soon as someone has a portable, editable file, the whole system is broken. Just like the floppy breaks the network.
CVS et al. needs to be done at some level so that the user never even knows it is happening. I believe that the whole co-laboration methods that we have currently are great for programers and techies but the average user is still shaking their heads in confusion. Just like what the average user is thinking about public key encryption.
What about Plone (Score:2)
A good one? (Score:1, Offtopic)
So...if you're familiar with Doug Engelbart, the manifesto is not good?
Is that right? I have to dig deep for my 9th grade geometry skills.
If not familiar, then good. So it follows that if not good, then familiar. Hmmm, I guess I didn't get it right. Still, the sentence is an odd one.
similar discussions on /. (Score:2, Insightful)
This would be an enhancement along the spirit of the article being discussed.
Another collaboration tool (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been working on a tool for a while which may be of interest in this discussion. The site is at www.forcomment.com [forcomment.com].
The concept is that a single user tends to create a document (or part of one) and usually then e-mails it out to others for comment. I allow the user to upload the document to our site, convert it from native format to HTML (where needed), invite those required to comment, and allow discussions to happen at the sentence level in the document. It should also work from all browsers. It is b
Re:Another collaboration tool (Score:1)
How is this different from a wiki?
Re:Another collaboration tool (Score:4, Interesting)
By having a set of Markup layers, gets much easier to see and manage comments, etc. Ideally, you should be able to simply toggle each layer of markup on and off, just like a mutli-layer image in PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro.
Some day we'll get real Hypertext, but we're defintely not there yet, and XML isn't it either.
--Mike--
Eugene Eric Kim (Score:2)
He should've gotten a C programmer to collaborate with him on cgihtml.a... because he obviously can't write stable code all by himself.
Where are the comments? (Score:1)
That said, I feel disappointed at the apparent lack of interest among
We need honest MarkUp (Score:2)
You can markup a copy of the document, but you can't do something as trivial as "link to characters 314-395 of document URL://whatever". If you want markup, you have to have write