Chapter 5
Building a Pairing Server

In this chapter, we’ll use Fulcrum,^[72] a free open source agile project-planning tool, as the code base for our pairing session. Fulcrum is a complete web application with a front end, a back end, and even a database. As a result, we’ll create a more complex development environment than the JavaScript setup we used for Backbone.js in Chapter 2, ​Collaborating with Text Only​. However, we’ll use the same pair-programming tools by deploying this development environment to a new platform.

The best pair-programming environment is secure, accessible, and responsive and gives both parties equal control. The cloud server we used as a reverse proxy in Chapter 3, ​Using the Cloud to Connect​, improved our ability to connect to a pairing partner, but it did not fix all of our security and connectivity problems. In fact, the extra layer of routing may even have degraded latency and caused a sluggish experience for our remote partner.

For these reasons, we’ll repurpose the cloud server and use it as a complete development environment. We’ll provision it with our development tools, our application infrastructure, and even our application’s source code. We’ll create some scripts that set up the programming environment for Fulcrum so we can quickly and easily stand up new environments solely for the purpose of a single pair-programming session.