Building Temporary Isolated Workspace in Real-Time Collaborative Programming Environment

Real-time collaborative programming supports a team of programmers to concurrently view and edit the same set of source code at the same time, which is beneficial in meeting particular collaboration needs. However, during the collaboration process, programmers are not able to compile and debug the source code with syntactic errors as it is being continuously edited by other collaborators. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach named Reversion of Error-free Code with Workspace Isolation (RECON) and contribute supporting techniques with prototype implementation. In this approach, the system continuously monitors the files being collaboratively edited, detects source code without syntactic error, and maintains additional Error-free source code copies. Whenever a programmer attempts to compile and debug the code, the system creates a temporary isolated workspace and replaces the source code files with the latest Error-free copies. The proposed approach and solution have been implemented in a prototype system named CoIDEA, which has indicated the feasibility of the scheme and techniques.