Category: Embattle

I followed up on Friday’s idea for a collaborative editor, and for a day’s worth of effort I’m pretty happy with what I achieved. The tentative name is Embattle as in, “Grab your battle keyboard and engage in bloody melee with your fellow developers!”

I have Yahoo’s YUI and JSON to thank for my success so far.

There are a couple of new articles on the Tech section of my web site. I’m slowly porting over things which have just been sitting around. The articles are about my FuseboxXF project, and my Physics simulation program. I still need to redesign the site and decide how to make it all dynamic, but at least there is more content!

I also added a placeholder for my newest idea: a web-based concurrent file editor (multiuser/multiplayer text editing). I came up with the idea while thinking about the next project I’ll start at work. Since the projects we do are (relatively) small, I can use Circuitmaker (another project I’ll be posting about soon) to create a framework for most of the application. After that though, it’s a free-for-all on the entire project, using Dreamweaver’s annoying file check in/check out functionality to avoid problems with multiple people editing the same file (clobbering). It’s annoying because you have to constantly ask someone if they are done with a file so you can edit it, and if they aren’t or they aren’t there, you could be out of luck and it is very disruptive. If three of us could all edit files at the same time, this problem would be virtually eliminated.

So, I searched and downloaded MoonEdit which doesn’t work the way I though it would. It’s fairly slick and it works, but it doesn’t give you a list of all the files in the directory you run it from. Instead, you can only edit files you create from within MoonEdit, and those files always end in “.me”.

In any case, there are some others out there now that I look at Wikipedia. Collaborative_real-time_editors and Collaborative_editor are good reference pages. Mine would be different from these in that users wouldn’t be able to edit the same line at the same time, and it would be optimized for LAN usage. Another feature which might be cool is to allow users to hold a lock on the entire XML element your cursor is in (if it’s an XML-compliant document).