Rapidly building synchronous collaborative applications by direct manipulation

Abstract

Existing GUI builder technology supports building user interfaces for interactive applications via direct manipulation. However, it is notoriously difficult to build the underlying data sharing and application logic for multi-user synchronous collaborative applications. This paper describes a collection of very high-level software components, built using the JavaBeans component standard, that enables domain experts and application designers to rapidly build entire collaborative applications via visual programming - drag-and-drop, customization and wiring. Our component suite supports conference setup, awareness, data sharing, media streaming, access synchronization, and temporally coordinated media and event streams. We illustrate that the task of building non-trivial multi-user applications using this approach is significantly simplified.