CoDeveloper: A Secure, Web-Invocable Collaborative Software Development Tool

65213 Increasingly, scientists are developing software with geographically distributed teams. Examples include the National Transport Code Collaboration and the NIMROD collaboration. For new scientists to join such a development team, they must learn how to navigate through the system, build it, and commit changes. Such learning is problematic in this situation, because the relevant expert may not be at the same institution. This project addresses the problem by developing a collaboration environment for code development, known as CoDeveloper. Such an environment would allow participants to work together ¿ synchronously and asynchronously ¿ in the tasks of file editing, build system modification, building and configuring. CoDeveloper will include built-in security mechanisms ¿ authentication, authorization, and encrypted transmission ¿ needed to prevent unauthorized use. In Phase I, security architectures were investigated as the mechanisms for authentication and authorization, encrypted transmission was implemented, and a code repository mechanism was incorporated. Remote and collaborative visualization was identified as the primary need of the community. Phase II will develop a plug-in capability for visual tools, allowing the visualization code to be shared and transmitted to a server. The server will render the visualization commands into a representation that can be transmitted to all clients for viewing. In addition, the special needs of viewing toroidal fusion data will be implemented. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: Remote visualization has many commercial applications, including visualization of data in the oil industry, aerospace, and semiconductor design. As in the scientific sector, these commercial areas are generating large data sets at remote sites, and collaborative visualization of these data is needed.