Kooperative multimediale Anwendungen: Basis für virtuelle Arbeitsumgebungen

The article starts describing synchronous, document-based groupware applications as an important basis for virtual workspaces and internet-wide distributed collaborating teams working in areas such as media design, engineering and electronic banking. New communicative and collaborative software solutions are preconditions for such scenarios. The article points out deficits of existing application sharing technology used for collaboration, suggests supplementing this technology by synchronous documentbased groupware applications and lists requirements for these applications. It is described how general support for replication, synchronisation and concurrency control a development framework should provide. Furthermore the article discusses, how the parts of an interactive application should be distributed by using the MVC paradigm. An approach based on replication that combines message passing and state passing for synchronisation and a distributed optimistic concurrency control with rollback-able short transactions are outlined. For handling resulting differences in application development, an advanced observer pattem is proposed.