CoServices: A Web Service Based Middleware Framework for Interactive Cooperative Applications

The availability of high performance network brings up numerous interactive distributed cooperative applications. Most of these cooperative applications are oriented a certain domain, and the system or part of its modules are difficult to be reused in any other application scenarios. However, after analyzing numerous cooperative applications, we found that these systems contain some common modules with very similar functions. Obviously, duplicated development of these modules leads to a mass of unnecessary costs. So, in this paper we have proposed a universal middleware framework called Co Services which provides these commons modules for new cooperative applications. To make the framework adaptive to heterogeneous scenarios, we have defined a set of interfaces using web service so that the framework can be compatible with multiple kinds of client platforms. Besides, we have built a uniform data sharing model which can be used to represent different types of data and integrate various data sources. In addition, to satisfy divers need for concurrency control in different situations, we have designed a configurable concurrency control algorithm which can be customized by configuration. Last, we have developed two applications based on Co Services to validate the effectiveness of the framework.