14 DAY TRIAL // Google's decision to shut down its Atlanta, Georgia office is not without its casualties. Though the decision may not have been completely voluntary, it is being felt.
Still, not all is lost. Collide for example, a collaborative IDE for the web, is being open sourced as the original team won't be working on it anymore, not at Google anyway.
It seems that Google was forced to shut down its engineering department in Atlanta after the departure of its leading figure, Bruce Johnson who spearheaded the Google Web Toolkit project.
Incidentally, Google is distancing itself from GWT and has appointed a steering committee to oversee the development of the open source project.
Part of the team in Atlanta was working on Collide, a web-based IDE that enabled collaboration, Google Wave style since it included some common code. But with the office being shut down, the project is dead as well.
As such, the code has been made open source and is available in a Google Code repository. At this stage, the project is in the very early stages. The foundation is there, but there are still plenty of features not to mention polish missing.
Still, if this sounds like something that might interest you, you can grab the code, via git, and see what it is about. The project relies on Google Web Toolkit, Guava and other libraries.
"My last year at Google, many of us in Atlanta worked on a project that was ultimately cancelled, concurrent with the office shutdown. However, on this 4th of July, I'm happy to say that one of the things I'll be celebrating is that we were able to liberate portions of our last year of work as a new open source project," Google's Scott Blum wrote.
"It's called 'Collide' (collaborative IDE), and is a web-based collaborative code editor. What we pushed out is extremely stripped down right now, but the most interesting tech stuff around collaborative editing is all there. Long term, we hope it will serve as a catalyst for improving the state of web-based IDEs," he added.