A distributed architecture for collaborative applications

Remote multi-user interaction in a collaborative environment is one of the hottest topics today in distributed computing, Web applications, and tele-learning. Their application area ranges from games to tele-laboratories, tele-medicine, network management, tele-commerce and others. While such environments, known as collaboratories, are currently available, many of these solutions are geared towards a specific application, do not employ a standard communication facility for distributed systems, and may lack scalability in that they are limited to only two collaborating identical applications at one time. The paper addresses these concerns by introducing a generic collaborative Orbix based distributed environment (CODE) for object oriented applications. The environment is flexible and allows for multiple remote users, employing different platforms, to work on the same application in a cooperative manner. In this type of setting, users engage in a process known as replication architecture (Java Collaborative Environment) where individual copies of the same application are run at different locations, forming a collaborative session. Within a session, any action applied to one application must also be applied to all other applications involved. CODE considers all these requirements, and in doing so, provides a flexible, robust and scalable cooperative environment that could be applied to any application