Reusing Single-user Applications to Create Multi-user Internet Applications

Although there are many groupware platforms existing nowadays, collaborative multi-user applications are not yet widely accepted by end-users. In contrast to single-user applications, groupware applications often still have prototypical character and are lacking software quality. In this paper we introduce a three-step approach for reusing existing single-user applications for collaboration-aware multiuser applications. The three-step approach is based upon on our toolkit DreamTeam and its extension DreamObjects. By offering services for communication and coordination as well as data management and user interface development they significantly simplify the transformation of single-user applications into collaboration-aware applications. At the end of the paper we validate our approach with two examples: a diagram tool and a publicly available spreadsheet tool