Saros brings distributed pair programming to Eclipse

In pair programming, two programmers share a computer and focus on different aspects of the code they create. In distributed pair programming, the two developers may work in different locations. Saros is an Eclipse plugin that connects programmers using Jabber/XMPP protocols. It features instant messaging capabilities, shared text file editing, and shared file operations – all of which, developer Christopher Oezbek says, “sets us apart from other collaborative editors such as Gobby, SubEthaEdit, or even Google Docs.”

Saros got its start in 2006 at the Freie Universität Berlin when Oezbek and his colleague Stephan Salinger sat down with student Riad Djemili to find a common research area and a master thesis for Riad. Salinger was interested in pair programming, while Oezbek wanted to research how to support open source collaboration. “And Riad was a heck of a programmer,” Oezbek says. “After six months of collaboration we had a working prototype. Today, 1,500 commits later and with another five students currently at work on the software, Saros has come a long way.”

Oezbek says in recent releases the project has polished multi-driver support, which means that two or more people can edit the same file at the same time. To try it out, users can go to Eclipse preferences -> Saros -> Enable Multi-Driver Support. The team has also increased support for various Jabber and XMPP servers; for instance, with version 9.8.21, Saros can be used with existing accounts from Google Talk and Jabber.org.

Oezbek notes that Saros is still beta software and a research project, so there are still bugs in it. Some plans for upcoming releases include better support for people who are using different platforms, different encodings, and different line endings. “We are also trying to improve our list of supported programming languages, which currently includes Java, C++ via CDT, Python via PyDev, PHP via PDT, and a couple more.” Oezbek says the project follows a three-week release schedule. The next release is scheduled for September 11.

Currently Saros is used at a German telecommunications firm to let their developers in Europe and Asia work together. If anybody else is interested in using Saros as a tool in any open source project, Oezbek says the project would love to hear about it.

The project also invites people to use and test Saros and say what they would like to see in future versions. “And bug reports are good as gold,” Oezbek says, “because they tell us about things we never thought about.” Oezbek says they can also use a help from developers who are familiar with XMPP and network coding and SWT user interfaces. To get in touch, drop a note to dpp-devel at lists.sourceforge.net.

Task Coach: A hierarchical to-do manager

Task Coach last week released a new version of its free, open source, cross-platform task manager, aimed at users who need more than a simple task list but who don’t need a full-fledged project management solution. The software supports hierarchical tasks and categories, time tracking, and synchronization using SyncML.

Developer Frank Niessink says, “We tend to release quite often, to incrementally improve the software and get rapid feedback from our users. Some of our more recent improvements include an iPhone/iPod Touch companion app, and new task viewers such as the square map and time line viewers.” The project plans to add a calendar view and improve performance in future releases, he says.

Among its interesting features, Task Coach lets you limit the tasks it displays to ones that belong to checked categories. And, Niessink says, “by using the dropdown menu on the category viewer toolbar you can switch between showing tasks that belong to all categories checked and tasks that belong to any category checked.”

Niessink says the project welcomes extra development help. “Task Coach is developed using Python and wxPython on the desktop and Objective-C on the iPhone. Check out our developer information page if you’re interested in helping out.”