What are good ways to collaberate on a group programming project?

Programmer Question

I'm in my second year of CS now (not the American one though) and am looking at a pretty big project next semester. I don't know the specifics just yet, but it'll involve a back-end in COBOL, most of the 'functionality' in Java and the rest in .Net. (I still know nothing about .Net, it's a course that starts in the 2nd semester as well)

We're programming Cobol in Percobol and Java in Eclipse. Next to the programming, we'll also have extra assignments such as English and French translation tasks that are often related to the software.

So here's my question: how would you organize this, knowing you work together with 3 other people?

Last year we had a smaller project. We synchronized our code using Google Code (through the Subversion plugin for Eclipse) and used Google Wave to share documents and updates. Google Wave was actually very useful, but it appears it's shutting down soon. I don't want to take any risks with a project this important.

Sharing documents is very easy with Dropbox, but it doesn't quite offer the flow of communication and interactivity that Google Wave did. (Can you add this sort of functionality to Dropbox?)

To state what I specifically need:

• A website or program to easily collaborate with 3 other people, sharing files and providing commentary. Google Wave is/was a good example. Dropbox is an improvement on the file sharing, but lacks in the communication department.




• An easy way to share a Cobol project? I'm willing to switch compilers, because Percobol royally sucks.




• You're welcome to comment about .Net, but I don't know anything about it yet so I don't really have questions about it (yet).

Any opinions or advice on the matter are welcome. Thanks in advance!

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