Duplex: A Distributed Collaborative Editing Environment in Large Scale

Abstract

DUPLEX is a distributed collaborative editor for users connected through the Internet. Large scale implies heterogeneity, unpredictable communication delays, and failures, and leads to inefficient implementations of techniques traditionally used for collaborative editing in local area networks. To cope with these unfavorable conditions, DUPLEX proposes a model based on splitting the document into independent parts, maintained individually and replicated by a kernel. Users act on document parts and interact with co-authors using a local environment providing a safe store and recovery mechanisms against failures or divergence with co-authors. Communication is reduced to a minimum, allowing disconnected operation. Atomicity, concurrency, and replica control are confined to a manageable small context. KEYWORDS: Collaborative editing, distributed groupware, large scale networks, concurrency control INTRODUCTION The past ten years have seen the number of interconnected computers and networ..