Building Groupwares over Duplicated Object Systems

Abstract

Groupware toolkits let developers build applications for synchronous and distributed computer-based conferencing. Duplicated object systems¹ (or DoS), on the other hand, manage distributed objects over the Internet and, since they include high-level features such as communication facilities, load balancing, fault tolerance, and hierarchical messaging, may be leveraged as building blocks for rapidly developing groupware toolkits. This paper describes how we built such a groupware starting from a particular DoS. The system contains a run-time architecture that automatically manages the creation, interconnection, and communications of the distributed processes involved in the working sessions, a set of groupware facilities allowing users to collaborate, to take action on state changes, and to share relevant data, and a session management and user control mechanisms accommodating the group’s working style.