A CSCW Supporting Platform: Providing General Services for Cooperation

In this paper we propose a CORBA based CSCW supporting platform which is a convenient environment for constructing CSCW systems. The platform provides general services as the infrastructure of CSCW systems. When developing cooperation applications for different purposes, besides considering the unique features each application requires, we have to deal with many functions needed by almost all those cooperative applications. In this paper we will examine some typical cooperative applications from programmers' view, aiming at learning which technical facilities are necessary for supporting cooperation. Rather than building a single type CSCW system, our intention is to provide a set of general functions and a framework for CSCW system. We call such a cooperation-enabling environment a CSCW supporting platform. We apply distributed object technology in designing the platform and deliver those general functions as common services. There are two types of services: fundamental service and advanced service. Fundamental service comprise cooperation management services designed to manage tasks and participators involved in cooperation, and communication services such as email, group communication management, real-time message service, etc. Upon fundamental service, several general purpose applications are developed such as chat, shared whiteboard and videoconferencing, which are provided as advanced service of the platform. These general services are defined using CORBA IDL and are implemented as CORBA objects. The supporting platform is implemented in Java and C++, and fundamental services are implemented primarily in Java. The CSCW supporting platform is not only hardware and operation system independent, but also language independent for it is CORBA-based. With these advantages, programmers can develop their own cooperative applications using any languages utilizing those services through predefined interfaces, and applications developed can be easily integrated with WWW. We have been developing a Web based cooperative authoring system based on this platform, and AutoCAD is also integrated to build a cooperative design system.