Treffer: A Framework for Building Collaboration Tools by Leveraging Industrial Components.

Groupware applications allow a distributed group of human users to work apart together over a computer network. They are difficult to develop due to the needs to suit a range of collaboration tasks that are often with diverse and evolutionary requirements. To address this problem, we propose a new framework in which shared data components conforming to a well-defined interface can be dynamically plugged in for flexible sharing, and a simple transformation tool is provided such that the myriad of industrial collaboration-transparent components can be transformed into shared components. The validity of our framework is evaluated by building a suite of typical collaboration tools such as group editors. Under our framework, most components in the Java Development Kit (JDK) can be transformed automatically for prototyping collaboration tools. With minimal manual work, those tools can be adapted to achieve advanced flexibility, e.g., data and control components can be bound dynamically to switch control protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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