Proactive control of group revision assistance management using P2P technology

This paper describes the prototype and evaluations of the GRAM (group revision assistance management), a peer-to-peer (P2P) and a proactive mechanism based revision management system. GRAM enables the software developer to exercise proactive version control of a development project, thus preventing serious problems from being caused by other systems. GRAM performs revision collision prevention and software source code synchronization in a potential overlay network of peers connected via the Internet/LAN/WAN. This system provides four special features in comparison with other version management systems: (1) higher system reliability and robustness; (2) effective revision collision prevention using proactive agents; (3) context-aware environment for team software revision; and (4) unified XML format for configurations and history files as well as system and agent exchange messages. Each peer of GRAM system has a unique identifier using the JXTA framework, and holds two spaces: a shared space synchronized with other peers and a workspace for the user's ordinary editing. Experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation on an enumerated network confirm GRAM's efficiency.