With the proliferation of mobile devices we witness an increasing demand for supporting collaboration among users working in the field and in the office. A key component for collaboration in this domain is sharing and manipulation of information using very different display capabilities on the diverse devices. We present a system based on a distributed repository of shared data objects and a client-server based infrastructure. The system is robust to intermittent connections, and a mixture of slow and fast links. To preserve bandwidth, applicationspecific data distribution agents decide what data to send to the clients. We also present a framework for building collaborative applications for clients with different display and processing capabilities. We describe example applications implemented both as Java applets to run in Web browsers and as Java spotlets to run on Palm OS based handheld computers. Using these applications we evaluated the framework and the results show that the framework is scaleable, offers good performance and has a high degree of code reusability.
This paper presents a JavaBeans framework that supports real-time synchronous collaborative applications. We contribute a generic collaboration bus as an enabling virtual "channel" that spans network fabrics and integrates collaborating clients. The bus provides a component-based plug-and-play environment that enables collaboration with applications that may or may not be collaboration aware. Any (including single-user) applications can be plugged in as is and made collaborative with no modifications to the application or to the collaboration bus. One of the activities supported by the framework is multi-user visual programming using JavaBeans: the users at geographically separate locations can collaboratively compose complex applications using component Beans. The framework has been implemented and tested on a variety of applications.
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