Installed the Netbeans Developer-Collaboration Module yesterday, and gave it a trial-run together with Jason. Wow!
The chat-client is pretty standard; not much to say there. The only thing we both disliked was that you have to use "Control-Enter" (or "Alt-N") to send your text rather than plain "Enter". Probably we could reconfigure the keybindings somewhere...
But! The ability to drag a file, folder, Java package or, indeed, entire project into the collab area, and then have both people (and presumably everybody in the chat session) simultaneously able to edit the same files, seeing each other's edits live,... pretty cool.
The real OhMiGod Factor was when Jason hit "compile" on the shared file, to have it compile on my PC (since the original file came from there,) with both of us seeing the compile output. Very, very cool!
We were speculating about some alternative form of development setup where all the code (and docs, web-pages, and other project components) get stored in a wiki-like (auto-versioned, of course) system so that its not just one developer's PC that gets to do the work... Just daydreaming, really. For now.
If you're working in Java, C/C++ or Ruby, and you work with other faraway developers (even occasionally -- the dowload is only a couple of meg) you owe it to yourself to explore the Netbeans Collab stuff. I am pretty sure that what we're seeing now is only the start.
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