Design of the DISCIPLE Synchronous Collaboration Framework

This paper presents the DISCIPLE framework, a novel architecture for synchronous groupware, which enables sharing of software applications by conferees that participate in collaborative knowledge work. The particular class of applications dealt with is Java components (Applets and Beans). The central part of DISCIPLE is conceptualized as a collaboration bus. It spans network fabrics and provides a virtual interconnect for geographically distributed clients. Collaborating users import Java components by drag-and-drop manipulation into their virtual workspaces. The imported component becomes a part of a multi-user application and all conferees can collaboratively interact with it. The bus achieves synchronous collaboration through real-time event delivery, event ordering and concurrency control. In addition, importing various Beans also allows user tailoring of the human-computer interface. Interface customization can be achieved with multimodal human-machine interfaces and the collaboration components (such as group awareness widgets, concurrency controllers, etc.). The system has been implemented and tested on a variety of Java applications