ThesisHTMLWhiteboard

Creating an IDE-independent Version of the Saros Whiteboard Using Web-Technologies

Background

Saros is an open source IDE plugin for distributed collaborative software development with a wide variety of features, including collaborative real-time file editing with various sharing options, inconsistency detection and a Whiteboard for communicating topics graphically.

The Whiteboard was first prototyped for Eclipse IDE by Michael Jurke in 2010 and was expanded later by Henrik Degener in 2012 with focus on usability, user experience and graphic tablets support

Purpose

Many efforts have been made to achieve an Eclipse independent implementation of Saros and all of its features with the goal of reducing the porting complexity to other IDEs and/or environments such as Intellij.

Consequently, the purpose of this thesis is to contribute to this ongoing process by separating the logic of the Whiteboard from the Eclipse GUI while also preserving the current infrastructure, especially the implemented SXE synchronization algorithm (Shared XML Editing).

Furthermore, this thesis will focus on re-creating the Whiteboard user interface with a more useroriented approach and using Web-technologies such as HTML/CSS/JavaScript which can run in web browsers cross-platform and cross-IDE seamlessly.

Plan

• Analyze the current architecture of the Saros-Whiteboard
  • Find entanglements between the logic and the GUI
• Define a clear interface between the logic and the GUI
  • Use it as a basis for the HTML Whiteboard
  • Re-implement features that are Eclipse-GUI-dependent
• Create a prototype of the HTML Whiteboard
  • Analyze the limitations of the runtime environment
  • Find solutions for these limitations without sacrificing functionality
  • Define the interface between the JavaScript logic and the Java logic
• Incrementally add features to the new Whiteboard
  • User-oriented approach

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