SORC: Service-Oriented Distributed Revision Control for collaborative web programming

Web applications become ubiquitous and more complex, often requiring team developmental work. Software configuration management (SCM) systems have long been used for managing collaborative development. However, the centralised architecture - the most common architecture of today´s SCM systems - which requires developers to replicate all project source files, is not suitable for Web applications, especially those that are service-oriented and distributed by nature. In this paper, we present Service-Oriented Revision Control (SORC), a distributed SCM model specifically for effectively supporting collaborative programming of Web applications, which does not rely on the centralised architecture or replicate project source files across developers. SORC allows a developer´s code to be exposed to their peers as Web services, while revision control of the project is at the service rather than the file level. We have further developed a prototype SCM system SORCER to test the feasibility of the new model.