Developing synchronous collaborative applications with TeamComponents

Abstract

. Synchronous groupware applications are playing a major role in, e.g., distance education, video conferencing, joint program development, co-operative publishing, etc. There exists a variety of platforms which relieve the groupware developer from struggling with standard problems like network details, synchronisation algorithms, etc., and allow him or her to concentrate on applicationspecific details. Although these platforms support simple applications, groupware with a reasonable number of different kinds of artefacts (e.g. word processors with embedded documents) is still difficult to realise. Component based approaches simplify the development of such applications, but, although these approaches are quite common in single user environments, they have not yet been widely incorporated into groupware development platforms. In contrast to single-user component approaches, additional problems have to be solved: collaborative components have to communicate with other sites a...