Online collaboration software has been on the rise since the World Wide Web pushed us into an era of cloud computing. Today, we review the 4 best online collaboration tools for developers. You can now harness the power of the cloud to do almost anything, such as; collaborate, create, and design before deploying applications. The use of collaboration tools can make teamwork more efficient through proper planning, organizing and managing of resources.
1. Beanstalk App
Beanstalk App is a popular collaboration tool for developers. It has a free version with 100 MB storage, and the paid packages start from $15/month. Beanstalk allows developers to achieve the following:
- Version control for mercurial, git or subversion code repositories
- Working from web or mobile browsers
- Instant HTML preview
- Code Editing using a built in editor within Beanstalk
- Assigning and seeing responsibility for each code line via a Blame tool
- Advanced deployment technologies to many cloud providers
- Issue tracking
- Email Notification
- Code review and comparison of changes in files
- A News Feed for your project, all within the activity feed panel
- A highly secure application
2. Jira by Atlassian
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
Atlassian is known for building products for developers. They are the makers of a very popular source code-hosting site called Bitbucket.org. They also make a lesser known, but powerful, project management software product for collaborative development, called Jira. Jira starts at $10/month. Jira boasts the following features:
- The ability to track everything, including issues, tasks and bugs
- Management of application lifecycle, from start to finish
- Facility for Agile Development (achieved through GreenHopper add-on)
- Linking of issues to source code
- Pulling in of code from various repositories like Github, Bitbucket, etc.
- Creation of custom searches using JQL (Jira Query Language) to make access quicker
- Building of custom dashboards as you and your team see fit
- Generation of reports of all kinds
- Over 400 add-ons allowing you to extend Jira’s power
- Creation of keyboard short cuts to access Jira features in a second
3. Github
Github is probably the most popular social coding software around. Every developer knows about it. A free version allows you to create many public repositories, whereas paid versions give you more features, like privacy, etc. Paid versions start from $7/month. Github has the following features:
- Collaborative features with the ability to contribute as part of teams
- Native clients for Mac, Windows and Mobile, so coding never stops
- Perhaps the greatest open-source coding community on the planet
- Git Powered Wikis for documentation and resources
- Integrated Issue Tracking
- Live code review
- Comments on each line of code (commits in git), Start a conversation
- Analysis of branches and comparison of source code for your project
4. Cloud 9
Cloud 9 is a cloud based collaboration tool for developers. It is more like a cloud based IDE (integrated development environment). It has two plans – a free version with basic facilities and a premium version starting at $12/month. Cloud 9 is special because of its real time coding and chatting environment, allowing remote developers to communicate and code great projects more efficiently. Here is what Cloud 9 has to offer:
- It enables real time code editing and chatting – pair programming
- You can pull in your project source code from a Github repository
- True terminal access, like make, telnet, VIM
- Runtime environment for Python and Ruby apps, Run apps on the cloud
- File access via SSH, FTP
- A great feature for rapid development, code completion
- App deployment for Heroku, Cloud Foundry, Azure and more soon
- Easy Go-to-file feature with multiple theme designs for code editing
- Support for Git and Mercurial along with CLI
These 4 collaboration tools for developers have their pros and cons, so the one you choose ultimately depends on your personal needs and preferences. Nonetheless, these cloud-based tools are very useful when it comes to collaborating with your geeky teammates, all within the comfort of a web browser. Try them out; who knows, you might just fall in love with one of them.