GitHub, a well known online versioning repository hosting system, now made social coding easy and convenient for team members, which enables collaborators to see what their team members are coding at real time.
GitHub launched Teletype for Atom that enables team members to share their workspace with remote collaborators. Developers can create a Teletype session from Atom and share this with online collaborators. Once team member will join the same session on Atom, Atom will be able to stream the content of user with collaborators.
This is a small steps towards the conflict free coding between two computers or two users in a team. Teletypes were used to create a real-time circuit between two machines so that anything typed on one machine appeared at the other end immediately. Following in these electro-mechanical footsteps, Teletype for Atom wires the keystrokes of remote collaborators directly into your programming environment, enabling conflict-free, low-latency collaborative editing for any file you can open in Atom.
Many people may confused and consider this as chatting system. But, in fact this is not a chatting system but sharing the coding environment across the team members sitting worldwide. For chatting or sharing the Atom session id team members need to use the chatting softwares like skype, slack etc.
By the way, working together on same file concept is not new. It is implemented long ago with Google doc and Google sheets but this time it is for coders. The main purpose to implement the feature is to prevent the code conflict between different users working on the same file.
The best part I got in Teletype for Atom is the freedom to choose theme. Each user can choose their preferred theme. No matter you have chosen dark theme or white theme, the same file can be open in different computer with different theme at the same time.
However, Teletype was built so that the number of people that would be useful to have working on the same file is smaller than the total number of connections a machine can accommodate.
Here are some benefits of using Teletype:
# Conflict Free Editing
While working on any sub-versioning or I will take specific example of Git, users can do collaborative editing but this is delayed collaborations. Means, user first perform local editing them merge it with repository and push to the central repository. Then, user on another side may take pull to start working on same documents.
Using Teletype, it will not delayed but replica of your written code will be directly delivered on another side and that makes the conflict free editing.
# Connecting Peers
Collaborators will be connected through WebRTC data channels, that makes the handshake between peers and shares connection metadata using GitHub servers, all data flows over encrypted peer-to-peer connections.
For now, Teletype is transmitting text only but they can come up with combine it with an application for voice communication. Traditional screen sharing can also be helpful for sharing the state of applications outside of Atom.
The application launched as beta for now.
