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.

A very flexible and fast implementation of CoObRA is the CoObRA 2 Library.

[Teaser Slides] C. Schneider: The Concurrent Object Replication frAmework Short slide teaser for workshop on the ICSE 2004.

[Schn03] C. Schneider: CASE Tool Unterstützung für die Delta-basierte Replikation und Versionierung komplexer Objektstrukturen; Diploma Thesis, Corolo Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany, 2003

[SZN04] C. Schneider, A. Zündorf, J. Niere: CoObRA - a small step for development tools to collaborative environments; Workshop on Directions in Software Engineering Environments; 26th international conference on software engineering, Scotland, UK 2004

[S07] C. Schneider: "CoObRA: Eine Plattform zur Verteilung und Replikation komplexer Objektstrukturen mit optimistischen Sperrkonzepten"; Dissertation, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany, 2007.

[Source Code] You can have a look at the source code of the first implementation of CoObRA

[CoObRA 2] Find information about the next implementation of CoObRA

You can experience the CoObRA features in the CASE-Tool FUJABA:

Versioning HowTo