Supporting Collaborative Software Design with a Plug-in, Web Services-based Architecture

Collaborative editing enables one or more users to edit artifacts simultaneously over a network. Collaborative editing is important in many kinds of editing tools such as Computer-Aided Design tools, Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools, drawing tools, and document editors. We describe a new approach for realising collaborative editing applications using Web Services. We have added this collaborative editing functionality as a component-based plug-in to Pounamu, a meta-CASE tool. We have used this plug-in, web services-based system to provide collaborative editing for a range of visual design environments. We describe the architecture of our approach, key design and implementation issues, and illustrate the feasibility of our approach by implementing it as plug-in Pounamu components and evaluating its effectiveness.