General Collaboration Structures for Interactive Data Language Applications

Interactive Data Language (IDL) is an arrayoriented data analysis and visualization application, which is widely used in research, commerce, and education. It is meaningful to make end user IDL applications collaborative on events between computers over networks, using a common message broker as the underlying communication system, and deploy them in Peer-to-Peer Grid architecture. In order to make a specific user application collaborative, we normally have to program on it, here and there throughout the whole package, mostly in places related to event handlers. While this approach is workable, it seems not a general solution for every application. We then propose two potential general solutions for solving the problem – the Dynamic Structure and the Embedded Structure. We specially focus on the Embedded Structure, analyzing the reasons, possible ways and points to conquer the problem, and the benefit out of it. We propose the “embedded collaboration object” concept for it.