[news.eclipse.technology.ecf] Collaborative Applications

[Carl Cook <carl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I have just found out about the ECF, and am very interested in helping 
develop it the future.

Just to let you all know, our research group has been developing 
collaborative software engineering applications for the last few years. 
 We have at present a collaborative, realtime UML class diagramming 
tool and text editor. Both tools are for java, but they could easily be 
used for other languages.

All tools run in real time and can work on shared artifacts for any 
number of users.  Behind the scenes is a server that holds a full 
semantic model of the project being developed.  This server also manages 
the users and artifacts within the project.

As a benefit of modeling the project as changes happen, we can produce 
immediate impact reports, and also alert users when someone enters their 
"neighbourhood of related code".

I see many similarities between ECF and what we have been working on, 
and hopefully I can help the ECF project out... possibly by porting our 
tools over to eclipse.

One issue I see at present is that whilst it is very important to have a 
suitable interprocess communication layer, well defined shared model of 
the software, and smart applications, the CSCW side of things is equally 
important.  Forgive me for not reading all of the newsgroup postings, 
but has much thought as of yet gone into concurrency control, remote 
user awareness and feedback, etc?  If not, hopefully I can be of some 
help to the application developers, and maybe even the core ECF platform 
developers if user awareness is built into the core structure of ECF.

If anyone is interested in talking to me about shared SE tools, feel 
free to post to this group or email me directly.  I will post a screen 
shot of my latest tools to:

http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/sevg/toolsSS.png,

and here are a couple of recent papers related to our work:

http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/papers/apsec04CAM.pdf
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/papers/acsc2005.pdf

(I have noticed the names of a couple of Collaborative SE researchers in 
the newgroup postings already!).

Kind regards, I look forward to working with this project, and I hope it 
all goes well!

~Carl Cook,
University of Canterbury, NZ.