A general collaborative platform for mobile multi-user applications

The aim of this paper is to propose a communication middleware which makes it possible to easily and efficiently develop the networking support for multi-user applications. Even though existing middleware and development tools provides lots of functionalities to realize distributed applications, they are purely low-level services passing the most development to developers or too specialized for a specific application. It brings a challenging issue of how to support sufficient and general high-level mechanisms by the middleware. To meet different networking and interaction requirements of multiple users, our approach is to address various possibilities of the communication architecture, the user membership management, the content transmission mechanism and the event management. In each requiring feature, the proposed middleware provides several options with application-level APIs and configuration so that the different interaction needs of a multi-user application can be easily handled in the developerspsila point of view.