Source: site.help [edit]

Help

Collaborama is a Collaborative Software Creation Ecoysystem (CSCE) that enables developers and teams to conceive of software ideas, gather requirements, get feedback, team up to work on a project, develop using an iterative process that encourages code reuse, and then test, deploy, market and sell the software project and/or select components or designs used in the project. For a little more background and motivation, read about Collaborama.

Collaborama Sidebar

If you swing your mouse to the left side of a Collaborama screen, you will see a sidebar that helps guide you through the Collaborama process:

• Invent: create a new Project (same as Group, read below), gather requirements for the new project in an issue tracker, and create a presentation that lets you communicate your idea to others.
• Team Up: Find the right people to work with you on your project, either Collaborama members or people with the right skills out in the world.
• Develop: Begin building your application in an interative, loosely-coupled manner that makes massive code reuse easy as pie.
• Market: Let others know about your project, and then release your creation into a marketplace of software and components.

Useful commands

At the top of every Collaborama page is a command line which you can use to quickly access resources (e.g. type 'help' to get to this help page) or execute commands. Collaborama has a variety of built-in commands that you can try, and you (and other members) can create new commands. See the Examples Page for samples, or use the ls command to get a complete list of commands available to you (just type "home" or "ls" above).

Especially useful commands include:

• ls: List available resources and commands.
• view(...): View the source code of a resource. This is a good way to get an idea of how Collaborama works.
• popular: Show resources that are used most often.
• whatsnew: See what new resources have been created recently.

Adding New Commands

Any member can help add new capabilities to Collaborama. Resources are editable in a collaborative fashion, much like pages on a wiki.

There are a few permissions restrictions; some particularly important commands (like "edit") are read-only, for instance.

Every command simply calls a particular resource. There are several types of resources: a web page (fills whole browser), a web snippet (displays inside of Collaborama), a URL, text files, or functions written in JavaScript or WebScript. WebScript WebScript programming language, is a simple scripting language that has special facilities for accessing and processing Web-related data.

Functions are typically pieces of code that may accept input and return a value, such as a computed number, or the results of querying a search engine. The return value can also be an entire Web page, or even a redirect to another Web site that holds the answer.

Groups

Groups are modules where a number of people can get together to work on a project or application. When you create or join a group, you can edit all functions belonging to that group, and the group is added to your default execution path. You may belong to more than one group at a time.

• To create a new group, use createGroup
• To invite someone to a group you belong to, use groupInvite(NameOfGroup,NumTokens)
• To signup for a group that someone has invited you to join, use groupSignup(NameOfGroup)
• To see all groups registered in Collaborama, use groups
• To see all members belonging to a group, use groupMembers(NameOfGroup)

See the programming page for further details on writing Collaborama functions.