Java-Based Multimedia Collaboration: Approaches and Issues

Real-time collaboration systems, in which participants share multimedia documents and applications in real time, have been a subject of interest for many years. Although computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems have existed for a long time, Webbased collaboration tools, such as Microsoft NetMeeting, have started to emerge relatively recently. Moreover, there has been much advancement in Internet-related technologies lately. Among them, Java applets seem to have introduced the most exciting notion: platformindependent applications provided by the network. From multimedia collaboration point of view, the next step in the evolution of applets is their real-time sharing among many users. In this paper, we will discuss the design issues of a framework for multimedia collaboration using Java applets. We will also elaborate on the implementation matters encountered during our experimentation with our JETS prototype.