Testing, One, Two, Three . . . we hope this mic is live, because this is a CodeTogether release announcement you don’t want to miss! Testing . . . is what you’re now going to be able to do, even as a guest in a session. That’s not all, you can also run remote launches, and we’ve made a number of fixes to improve your everyday coding experience. For our on-premises customers, we’ve added an all new dashboard with enhanced metrics, and if you’re a free tier user, we’ve made a change you’re sure to appreciate – read on for the details.
As a guest in a CodeTogether session, you can now easily run and analyze tests that exist in the shared workspace, from whichever client you’ve connected with – even the browser! If your team engages in TDD, this is a capability you’ll find invaluable.
We’ve made it intuitive to run remote tests by making these actions available where you’d normally find them in your IDE. Test runs can be initiated from the editor ruler area, context menus, dedicated views, and yes, even using your IDE’s native shortcuts.
No matter who launches a test – host or guest, the results will be displayed in your client’s test results view and in the editor ruler area. In IntelliJ hosted sessions, CodeTogether will even pick up tests that are run by Maven or Gradle build processes and ensure those are relayed to guests. Guests can see which tests have passed, failure output, and even the difference between expected and actual results, if the host IDE supports it.
In this initial release, we support JUnit and TestNG on Eclipse, and JUnit, TestNG, PHPUnit and pytest/unittest on IntelliJ and VS Code. While other frameworks may well work for IntelliJ and VS Code, these have not been extensively tested. We will continue to add support for additional frameworks – let us know which ones you’d like us to prioritize.
It’s not just tests, we’ve added the ability to execute run configurations that exist on the host IDE as well. Any output from these processes will be shared with the clients, of course. You will find these in your client wherever you normally find local configurations to execute.
For more information on running tests or launches, please read our documentation.
If you’re running CodeTogether on-premises, we now have a brand new dashboard presenting a comprehensive overview of CodeTogether use in your organization. The dashboard displays current information like the number of active sessions and users online, as well as historical graphs like the number of sessions per day, and peak concurrent sessions. It also has a menu from where different logs can easily be downloaded.
Navigate over to https://SERVERFQDN/dashboard to access the dashboard – it’s password protected to prevent unauthorized access.
So that you keep your stats between CodeTogether version updates, we recommend mounting your logs area on a stable volume that would be persisted across restarts. For more details, please read our dashboard documentation.
That’s not all – if you’d like to monitor your CodeTogether server with Prometheus, Graphite, or any other monitoring tool, we now expose everything you see in the Dashboard using StatsD.
For details on the configuration updates required for these new capabilities, please read our on-premises installation guide.
As many of you have asked, free sessions can now be upto 60 minutes long, up from the earlier 45 minute limit. This new limit, along with the ability to have 3 guests in your session, is available only to registered users, so make sure you register and log in when using CodeTogether. Registration is free, and payment details are not required. For anonymous users, sessions are limited to 45 minutes, and can have only a single guest.
We’ve made dozens of fixes in this release, many specific to IntelliJ based IDEs as hosts or clients, and several general fixes as well. Please take a look at the categorized list of fixes below.
In some situations, we realize there really is no alternative to being able to share your screen, and a few users have asked for integrated audio conferencing support. We hear your need to be heard! These features are going to be major focus areas for our upcoming releases. In line with everything we do here – exciting stuff!
To learn more about CodeTogether, read our documentation or check out our videos on YouTube. You can always chat with us live on Gitter or drop us a note on Twitter. Until next time, happy coding!
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