DistView: support for building efficient collaborative applications using replicated objects

Abstract

The ability to share synchronized views of interactions with an application is critical to supporting synchronous collaboration. This paper suggests a simple synchronous collaboration paradigm in which the sharing of the views of user/application interactions occurs at the window level within a multi-user, multi-window application. The paradigm is incorporated in a toolkit, DistView, that allows some of the application windows to be shared at a fine-level of granularity, while still allowing other application windows to be private. The toolkit is intended for supporting synchronous collaboration over wide-area networks. To keep bandwidth requirements and interactive response time low in such networks, DistView uses an object-level replication scheme, in which the application and interface objects that need to be shared among users are replicated. We discuss the design of DistVlew and present our preliminary experience with a prototype version of the system