Engineering plug‐in software components to support collaborative work

Many software applications require co‐operative work support, including collaborative editing, group awareness, versioning, messaging and automated notification and co‐ordination agents. Most approaches hard‐code such facilities into applications, with fixed functionality and limited ability to reuse groupware implementations. We describe our recent work in seamlessly adding such capabilities to component‐based applications via a set of collaborative work‐supporting plug‐in software components. We describe a variety of applications of this technique, along with descriptions of the novel architecture, user interface adaptation and implementation techniques for the collaborative work‐supporting components that we have developed. We report on our experiences to date with this method of supporting collaborative work enhancement of component‐based systems, and discuss the advantages of our approach over conventional techniques. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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