In the light of the Web 2.0 movement, web-based collaboration tools such as Google Docs have become mainstream and in the meantime serve millions of users. Apart from established collaborative web applications, numerous web editors lack multi-user support even though they are suitable for collaborative work. Enhancing these single-user editors with shared editing capabilities is a costly endeavor since the implementation of a collaboration infrastructure (accommodating conflict resolution, document synchronization, etc.) is required. In this paper, we present a generic transformation approach capable of converting single-user web editors into multi-user editors. Since our approach only requires the configuration of a generic collaboration infrastructure (GCI), the effort to inject shared editing support is significantly reduced in contrast to conventional implementation approaches neglecting reuse. We also report on experimental results of a user study showing that converted editors meet user requirements with respect to software and collaboration qualities. Moreover, we define the characteristics that editors must adhere to in order to leverage the GCI.
The data binding pattern is an established technique to couple user interface (UI) elements and data objects. Various markup languages (e.g. Microsoft XAML, Adobe MXML) integrate advanced data binding concepts in order to ease application development. However, the HTML standard does not embrace means for data binding although being the Web markup language supported by millions of Web programmers. Therefore, we propose a standard-compliant WebSocket-based Data Binding (WebSoDa) framework. The WebSoDa framework synchronizes data objects and UI elements by orchestrating a Microdata-based data binding language as well as a client-side and a server-side messaging component. Thus, developers may speed up the tedious task of implementing binding associations in Web applications.
Creating awareness about other users' activities in a shared workspace is crucial to support efficient collaborative work. Even though the development of awareness widgets such as participant lists, telepointers or radar views is a costly and complex endeavor, awareness widget reuse is largely neglected. Collaborative applications either integrate specific awareness widgets or leverage existing awareness toolkits which require major source code adaptations and thus, are not suited to rapidly enrich existing web applications. Therefore, we propose a generic awareness infrastructure promoting an accelerated, cost-efficient development of awareness widgets as well as a non-invasive integration of awareness support into existing web applications. To validate our approach, we demonstrate the integration of three developed awareness widgets in four collaborative web editors. Furthermore, we expose insights about the development of reusable awareness widgets and discuss the limitations of the devised awareness infrastructure.
Abstract. Recently, industry has adopted multimodal, context-aware applications. However, addressing various modalities on heterogeneous platforms implies a demanding development effort. Therefore, we present a task-centric methodology and a tool chain leveraging the development of adaptive multimodal applications. In order to improve efficiency the tool chain is based on the Model Driven Architecture approach emphasizing two key principles: model-to-model transformations and tool integration.
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