CoObRA - a small step for development tools to collaborative environments
Christian Andres Schneider · 2004
Working on large software projects commonly requires software development in teams, which requires a tight interaction within the development team. Usually each developer is responsible for a certain part of the whole system. Therefore, it is necessary to let developers work independently without disturbing their teammates as well as allowing them to share their results with their teammates at a certain time and to integrate the developed software parts. Common practice is to use CASE-tools to support large software projects and a software configuration management (SCM) system that supports team coordination. Popular SCM systems are usually based upon text files and fail in versioning binary files or object-oriented structures on a fine-grained level, as usually produced by CASE-tools. On the other hand, current CASE-tools insufficiently support versioning and team coordination. CoObRA is a framework that offers undo/redo-, persistency-, multi-user-support and version control techniques for applications based on object-oriented data models in general. The major advantage is that it provides an easy-to-use mechanism requiring very low integration costs. CoObRA was successfully integrated in the Fujaba tool suite and is also part of Fujaba's code generation facilities that offer CoObRA's features to applications generated with Fujaba. However, CoObRA may easily be used outside Fujaba, too.