The Next Generation of Collaborative Development
I have recently discovered Google Docs, and decided that I love it, like many things Google. I was collaborating on a few documents with a friend, and watched in real-time as he edited and fixed my typos. He was somewhere in Vancouver, BC and I was sitting my gitches on my couch in Mississauga, ON. It dawned on me that this is collaboration could be the key to distributed development.
Suppose there was Google IDE, you could have developers pair-programming remotely and watching each other code. It would be revolutionary! Incorporated with Subversion and revision history, your development environment now lives on a remote server. For fresh, new startups and open-source projects you could house your project and code on Google. For corporations and proprietary source code, you could install the web application internally.
In some ways, this would be similar to the “screen” program in Unix, where you could trade control back and forth to each other and see each other type. Of course, it would need to have all the features of eclipse, minus the bloat and memory consumption.
When the Internet goes down, you could still code and work, since its just a text editor. Perhaps give the option of storing a cache locally for offline development. Perhaps even add a merge functionality for when you reconnect to the repository. It would need to be responsive, so obviously the UI has to be responsive like everything else Web 2.0.
No longer would you need to download overly bloated IDEs, or wait for minutes as the Mac color wheel spins, eating up memory. No longer would you need to undergo a learning transfer as you upgrade to the next popular IDE of the Month/Year/Decade.
How would we build this, short of getting hired by Google? If we built this first, there’s a slim chance that Google will buy us. Slowly developing more and more applications running solely on the Internet, Google has solved many problems and done the hard part for us. Soon “Google” will become synonymous with “Internet” and that would be just fine with me.
We need to take our cues from Google, and create wealth by solving the hard problems. Build something people will want to use, because our measure of success will not be how technically perfect our solution is, but by how many people find our product useful. Otherwise, it is just adding to the already cluttered closet of the Internet.
