Welcome to ceno

ceno is a set of eclipse plugins aimed to support collaborative work by the means of "Workspace Awareness". The main idea is to prevent concurrent modifications of a resource that is opened on multiple eclipse workbenches. Imagine a scenario where one developer edits a file but keeps it uncommited (not checked into a code repository) on its local hard drive. Some minutes later, an other member of the project team opens the same file without knowing that this file has some uncomitted changes on another developer machine. This results in merging conflict later when both try to check in their code. In case of rather simple structured code files such as Java or C# documents, merging is not allways complicated, but still requires some manual effort. However, if the files to merge contain binary content or are not that maintainable such as big uml diagrams, merging sometimes is not (or hardly) possible.

The ceno platform tries to solve this problem by realizing the missing notification at that point of time where one developer opens a resource that is currently opened or has uncommited changes on a machine of a second developer. Therewith, both are able to synchronize their code to avoid the mentioned merging conflicts.

The figure above demonstrates ceno in action. The eclipse package explorer on the left hand side annotates the developer names which have currently opened this resource. In case of opening one of these files, the IDE will open out a warning dialog.

Technically, the ceno framework bases on a client-server architecture. Each developer involved needs to connect to a central ceno server. Each time when opening a resource, ceno fires a corresponding event which will be handled by the ceno server. The underlying communication platform is not only limited to open and close resource events but to each type of events. This allows a stable base for future development of features such as messaging, data transmission and so on.

ceno is open source licensed under Eclipse Public License -v 1.0 (http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html). Feel free to join the project. The sourceforge project site can be found at https://sourceforge.net/projects/ceno/.

News

• ceno is nominated for the Ecliplse Community Awards 2012. Further info can be found here.
• ceno 0.1.1 version is now released and available via update site or Eclipse Marketstore. Version 0.1.1 is more stable and fixes a bug for using a different server bind address. Also it contains base code and refactoring for the upcoming SVN notification feature (scheduled for version 0.1.2).
• November 15, 2011: ceno was demonstrated at the 10years Eclipse anniversary democamp in Munich. The event was hosted by EclipseSource Munich. More details can be found on their blog.
• The german "Eclipse Magazin" published an article about ceno in ther 4.2010 edition. The article can be downloaded here

Credits
ceno bases on http://wiki.eclipse.org/Net4j. Iconset taken from http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/. Switching colors directly taken from http://kuler.adobe.com/