Towards cross-platform collaboration - Transferring real-time groupware to the browser

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets play an increasing role in today´s working environment. The variety of computer platforms increased in the same way, which makes the development of cross-platform applications even more challenging. Tele-Board is a real-time remote collaboration system based on the Java programming language. Therefore, it cannot be run on most mobile devices. In order to overcome this limitation, we redeveloped the system on the basis of HTML5 technology. We present an approach for combining web based networking and rendering in a single application for real-time collaboration based on SVG, HTML5 Canvas, Websockets, and Web workers. In our prototype we implemented optimization mechanisms leveraging the Canvas API´s rendering flexibility. This way, our canvas based rendering performs better than a respective SVG version. Moreover, our solution integrates server communication effectively so that the rendering performance is hardly influenced by user input.