Social networking is a daily part of many people’s lives. Whether it is for personal enjoyment or professional reasons, no one can discount the effect of social networking on the way we live and work.  Why not apply these principles to the way developers code and create software? 

That was the goal of an open source project called RCloud within AT&T Labs: to create a social coding environment where software developers can rate, search and share code with one another, using social networking principles.

What is RCloud?

So what is RCloud? At a high-level, RCloud is an infrastructure for big data analysis and visualization, sharing, reporting and collaboration. It consists of several parts that can be used as a whole, separately or any subset thereof. These include its web-based front-end, data management capability and distributed computing system.

We had two central requirements when developing RCloud:

  • Creating a framework that could handle the data management and high throughput computing (HTC) needs for today’s big data problems; and
  • Ensuring the RCloud environment, results and visualizations could be accessed via standard web browser.

To learn more about RCloud, read our complete Innovation Space blog post.

rcloud_graphic_story

 

Example of an RCloud notebook, which includes sections for rating notebooks, searching notebooks, sharing code and documentation and visualizing code output. Because notebooks are accessible via web browser, this information is accessible from anywhere and any connected device, making programming more collaborative.