Chapter 6
Collaborating with an IDE

In one of my favorite pairing experiences I worked alongside a team of Java developers in India. Because I was located in the United States, we had to deal with vastly different time zones and terrible latency. We couldn’t find a two-way screen-sharing experience tolerable enough for both parties, and we had trouble sustaining a direct SSH connection. We tried using a virtual cloud server located in the western United States, which was fine for me, but my partner still struggled.

We found a solution to our problem in Eclipse—a development tool we already had in use. The Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) can be extended by installing various plug-ins that add new behavior.^[79] One plug-in, called Saros, enables a collaborative editing environment that works well with high-latency networks.^[80]

Saros uses a conflict-resolution algorithm to merge changes from two separate clients, which means two programmers can work on the same file, see the other programmer’s changes, and still experience local edit speed (that is, there’s no lag for either party after pressing a button or moving the mouse). Saros includes additional collaboration tools such as whiteboarding and instant messaging. It even allows for fine-grained control over what files and directories are shared. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to install, configure, and use Saros in your projects—even if they aren’t Java projects.