CoWinTool: A General Toolkit for Supporting the Development of Collaboration-aware Applications

摘要

In the domain of design, where managers, designers, producers and even customers have to cooperate firmly with each other, the systems which could support cooperative design, especially the collaboration-aware applications, attract much attention these days. This paper describes a tookit, called CoWinTool, to facilitate the development of such systems. The toolkit is intended for supporting synchronous collaboration to object-oriented applications. In CoWinTool, great efforts has been devoted to the "group awareness" support and channels for human to human interactions. The main functiosn of the toolkit is integrated into a series of base classes, which could serve as an extension tot he foundation classes of the developing environment. In this paper, we describe the design of CoWinTool and discuss some of the implementation issues of the toolkit.