A Generic Pattern-based Design for Distributed Collaborative Editors

Abstract

With the advent of information sharing technologies, users can share and collaborate in performing common tasks through the use of distributed collaborative applications. Specifically, Distributed Collaborative Editors (DCE) are more and more used in many fields including healthcare, education, software engineering, military, etc. However, all proposed DCE frameworks focused on coordination algorithms, i.e. how to ensure data convergence, while very little attention was given to addressing the design of DCE which shall be the fundamental step for DCE frameworks construction. In this article, we analyze and design DCE as the structure of five layers comprising classifiers, relations among them, and their main properties. We contribute in two areas. First, we define a generic DCE architecture that captures organization, business and software aspects of DCE. Secondly, we propose a pattern-based design that emphasizes good design principles for the business core of DCE. This design will allow DCE researchers and developers to converge towards the same generic framework while improving the quality and performance of proposed DCE applications and tools.