Session management for collaborative applications

ABSTRACT

Session management systems for collaborative applications have required a great deal of reimplementation work by developers because they have been typically created on a case-by-case basis. Further, artifacts of this development process have limited the flexibility of session management systems and their ability to cooperate across applications, resulting in the fairly formalized, heavy-weight session management found in most collaborative systems today. We present a model for a light-weight form of session management, the theoretical foundation for this model (based on the sharing of information about user and system activity), and details of a collaboration support environment which implements our session management model.

References

1. 1.Ahuja, S.R., Ensor, J.R., Horn, D.N. "The Rapport Multimedia Conferencing System." Proceedings of Conference on Office Information Systems, Palo Alto, CA: IEEE, 1988, 1-7.
2. 2.Crowley, T., Milazzo, P., Baker, E., Forsdick, H., and Tomlinson, R. "MMConf: An Infrastructure for Building Shared Multimedia Applications." CSCW 90: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Los Angeles, CA: ACM, 1990, 329- 342.
3. 3.Dewan, P., and Choudhary, R. "Flexible User Interface Coupling in a Collaborative System." Reaching Through Technology, Proceedings of ACM CHI "91: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New Orleans, LA: ACM, 1991,41-48.
4. 4.Dewan, P., and Choudhary, R. "Primitives for Programming Multi-User Interfaces." UIST 91: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology, Hilton Head, SC: ACM, 1991,69-78.
5. 5.Dourish, P., and B ly, S. "Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Work Group." Striking a Balance, Proceedings of ACM CHI "92: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Monterey, CA: ACM, 1992,541-458.
6. 6.Edwards, W. Keith. Intermezzo Implementation Notes. Georgia Tech GVU Center Technical Report GIT- GVU-93-42, 1993.
7. 7.Gibbs, S.J. "LIZA: An Extensible Groupware Toolkit." Wings for the Mind, Proceedings of ACM CHI "89: conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, TX: ACM, i989, 29-36.
8. 8.Grief, I., and Satin, S. "Data Sharing in Group Work," Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings, Irene Grief, ed. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1988, 477-508.
9. 9.Manandhar, S. "Activity Server: You Can Run But You Can't Hide." Multimedia for Now and the Future: Proceedings of the 1991 USENIX Conference, Nashville, TN: USENIX Association, 1991,299-312.
10. 10.NCSA Collage for the X Window System User's Guide, National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
11. 11.Patel, Dorab, and Kalter, Scott D. "A UNIX Toolkit for Distributed Synchronous Collaborative Applications." Computing Systems, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993, p. 105-134.
12. 12.Patterson, J. F., Hill, R. D., Rohall, S. L., and Meeks, W. S. "Rendezvous: An Architecture for Synchronous Multi-user Applications." CSCW 90: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Los Angeles, CA: ACM, 1990, 317-328.
13. 13.Roseman, M., and Greenberg, S. "GroupKit: A Groupware Toolkit for Building Real-Time Conferencing Applications," Sharing Perspectives: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW'92, Toronto, Ontario: ACM, 43-50.
14. 14.Stefik, M.J., Bobrow, D.G., and Kahn, K.M. "Integrating Access-Oriented Programming into a Multiparadigm Environment." IEEE Software, 3,1, IEEE Press, January, 1986, 10-18.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Designing software

      • Software implementation planning

        • Software design techniques

    • Software development process management

  • Software notations and tools

    • Development frameworks and environments