Saros Documentation

Saros is an Open Source IDE plugin for distributed collaborative software development.

It works with and within Eclipse. Saros users can use all Eclipse functionality as usual.
We are working on a version for IntelliJ (and IDEs based on the IntelliJ platform) as well. See the release notes of our latest alpha release for more information.

Saros is a real-time collaborative editor.

  • All collaborators have an identical copy of Eclipse projects.
  • Two or more users can jointly edit files in the project.
  • Each user has and modifies his or her own copy of the file locally.
  • Saros keeps these copies in sync by transmitting each change to all of the other collaborators.

Saros supports up to 5 participants at once.

  • Saros is designed to at least work with two participants in a session - as inherent for pair programming.
  • But it supports up to 5 distributed parties in a session.
  • The initiator of a session, the host, has a privileged role.

Saros is not screen sharing, desktop sharing, or application sharing.

  • That means for instance that it does not support joint interactive testing.

Saros can be used in various scenarios.

  • Joint review

    One participant (“driver”) reviews the contents of one or more files together with other participants (“observers”). Saros is set to always show the observers the same region of text (program code or whatever else) that the driver sees (“follow mode”). At any time, any participant (driver as well as observers) can highlight text with the mouse for all the others to see. Also, any participant can become driver at any time.

  • Introducing beginners

    Much like before, except that explaining rather than reviewing is the goal. Each of the beginners (staying in the observer role) can individually peek at other regions of the file or even other files without influencing the flow of the session for the others. To do that, s/he will temporarily leave follow mode.

  • Distributed Party Programming

    Two or more participants work together in a loosely coupled fashion. They work independently much of the time, but can call one of the others to help whenever the need arises, for possibly only a very short time or for a longer episode. In this mode, distributed work can even be more powerful than working in the same room, as nobody needs to leave a seat to help multiple others in the course of an hour. Just think how this can speed up the coordination work just before release time after a code freeze!

  • Distributed Pair Programming  is a particular form of Distributed Party Programming in which two people develop code or text in continuous close collaboration, discussing the approach and combining the best of their ideas.