A testbed of integration and collaboration for legacy single-user CAD applications

This paper explores a testbed to add collaborative capabilities to single-user CAD applications. The testbed uses internal encapsulation and external encapsulation to wrapper legacy single-user CAD applications. The communication mechanism and experiments of encapsulation agent are studied. The basic issues for collaborative applications, such as consistency maintenance, group awareness and collaborative management, are discussed. The proposed method was implemented with case study of prototype tools to integrate both homogeneous and heterogeneous single-user application for collaborative application. In this way, the standalone CAD systems can integrated into network-based collaborative design environment