NetBeans Collaboration Service

Those who like myself have worked with IBM Lotus Notes for a while will remember the theme of the "THREE Cs ... Communicate, Collaborate, Coordinate" that was used for a number of years to emphasize Lotus Notes' prime strengths. Notes is rightly famed for its excellent collaboration capabilities that devolve from its basic architecture.

So it was with great interest that I just read Charles Ditzel's recent blog entry NetBeans Collaboration Project : Collablets and Code-Aware Tools for Sharing which explains how the NetBeans Collaboration Project "allows remote sharing of code, code reviews and walk-throughs among many remote developers that may even choose to use a collablet VOIP feature to augment their work, as well as code-aware instant messaging tools."

This looks like an outstanding capability to be built right into a development tool.

There's even a free NetBeans Collaboration Service for the NetBeans community... "The Developer Collaboration feature in NetBeans 4.1 IDE allows you to connect to a collaboration server. With this feature, you can engage with other developers in conversations, wherever they are located in the next room or across the continent. You can also share your projects and files in real time, allowing others in the conversation to make changes, which are presented to the rest of the group in visual cues."

AN ASIDE:
I like Eclipse for what it can do extremely well, and I also like NetBeans very much. My approach is not to be a one-eyed finatic about any single tool, but to have a kitbag containing multiple tools: it's a matter of "Horses for courses" or "Use the best tool for the job in hand." We all benefit from variety, innovation and competition!