Sangam (pronounced sung-um) means confluence in Hindi - from the Sanskrit samagama. In Extreme Programming, we try to create a confluence of ideas, efforts, and team-spirit to create software that is truly unique - which wouldnt have been possible if it were to be created by a single person. The key practice in Extreme Programming is Pair Programming - whereby two programmers share the same terminal - and program together. Pair Programming is the core practice that makes XP so much fun.

However, when teams are distributed - one cannot do pair programming due to limitations in the tools - which usually send the entire picture from one terminal to another. This is a waste of bandwidth, and is prohibitive to dialup connections.

In the open-source world, we rarely get to meet or pair-program with other smart programmers on the same project. If we were to be able to do this in a simple, cost-effective manner, this would revolutionize the way we program. In the commercial world too, it would no longer be necessary to have teams in the same location if we could have effective tools for pair programming.

It is with this objective that the Sangam project has been started - to bring people together. Sangam is a plugin for the Eclipse platform - and the messaging is done on the open-source Kizna Syncshare Messaging Platform. This project is still in an alpha stage - but you can check out our first working prototype. Hopefully with support from the open source community, and people knowledgable in Eclipse, we can quickly build a tool that is going to help us achieve this much-needed confluence.

Sangam is released under GPL. Click on the download link to get started. This prototype has currently been tested on Windows. We plan to test extensively on other platforms soon.