Architectural Design of a Toolkit for Synchronous Groupware Applications

摘要

The central question studied in this thesis is how to design high-level reusablecomponents for developing synchronous groupware applications. A modern user interface requires the separation of applications into two components namely application and graphical user interface. An effective architecture for synchronous, multiple-user groupware applications requires a separation of one more component from the application: the management of the session and shared data. This component provides a framework that manages the collaborative user session, shared data in an abstraction form, and floor control. This thesis calls this separation coordination independence. This thesis demonstrates the feasibility of the architecture by describing an experimental system, called TALISMAN, using Garnet. TALISMAN is implemented as a single-process, centralized system with multiple remote graphical displays. The system which features this separation relies upon object inheritance and the constraint satisfaction mechanism in the underlying object system. The architecture also makes the conversion of a single-user application into a multiple-user application relatively easy.