Model-based development of synchronous collaborative user interfaces

This paper undertakes with collaborative software development taking into account requirements emerged from recent progress in technologies relevant to networks and computing devices. Considering this technological breakthrough, especially under the light of the consequently sharply growing online virtual communities, we can deduce that a new substance is given to the software supporting collaborative practices for multiple environments. In such cases, one important aspect to consider is the user interfaces (UIs) design supporting group work appropriately. The results today offer a rich insight to the desired groupware functionality and the features devised to facilitate such functionality (i.e., replication models, object sharing, floor control, etc). On the other hand, very little is known about their capability to facilitate generation of multi-user interfaces to groupware applications. With the advent of model-based user interface engineering, which signifies a move towards transformation-based approaches to generating the user interface, one challenge is bridging across these two perspectives. The current work seeks to contribute to this goal by identifying the type of models needed to capture collaborative behavior in synchronous multiple user interface settings as well as generating the collaborative user interface by making use of suitable platform-oriented architectural models.