Thin Client Collaboration Web Services

In this paper we introduce some collaboration applications, and the needs in changing them to Web Services. We propose and describe the idea of Thin Client Collaboration Web Services, and explore some potential scenarios of this idea in which it shows its merit and the freedom resulted in collaboration. Such a Web Service has two sets of ports: Userfacing Input/Output ports and Resource-facing Input/Output ports. The user-facing I/O contacts a Web Service viewer, and the resource-facing I/O contacts a collaboration application. Hence, the role of the Web Service is to transcode in both directions between the two sets of ports with respect to displays and events, so that the user accesses the Web Service viewer as if the collaboration application itself. We use three collaborative applications as resources, and projects in SVG as the demonstration of our initial effort in the implementation of a General Thin Client Collaboration Web Service.