Class Experiences in Writing Collaborative Client/server Applications for the Internet Draft in Progress

This paper reports on experiments and experiences with implementations of collaborative client/server archi-tectures, a software project that involved all students in the class. Nominally, the major goal of the special topics graduate class was to explore the Frontiers of collaborative computing on the Internet. The class brought together a team of seven students, each with some programming experience under UNIX, WindowsNT, and MacOS. Few students had limited experience in Java programming, and one student had signiicant experience in Tcl/Tk programming. Each student has learned about the rudiments of Tcl/Tk programming during the rst few weeks of the course so that the remainder of the course could be devoted to a major joint class project that applied and extended the principles of client/server programming under Tcl/Tk. A speciic deenition of the collaborative project itself molded the project: An entity with distributed participants, distributed data sets and libraries, distributed tool sets and libraries, and objectives to be met by completing well-deened sequences of tasks { assigned by the the project leader, and subject to collaborative project activity and reviews. The project initial driver: a client/server architecture and implementation to support collaborative document composition such as joint writing and typesetting this paper itself. After the initial student assignment to write speciic sections of the paper, compositions are compiled for a complete paper by the project leader or as individual drafts by project participants. This implementation is but a special case of the user-conngurable client/server architecture that supports project leader assignments of edit/access permissions to partitions of project data, libraries, tools, and workkows { additional demos include collaborative execution of projects in the areas of software or hardware design. Overall, the major milestones of this class project are: proociency in Tcl/Tk that allowed each student to manipulate data and widgets, apply socket programming principles, and create a progression of client/server applications, from simple textbook cases to features that are unique to the class project. a unique client/server architecture prototype, partitioned into an Asynchronous Group Server (AGS) and a Synchronizing Group Server (SGS) { driven by and matched to the stated concept of a collaborative project. a universal AGS server that support any number of user-conngurable AGS clients (accessible through a Web-browser from a Mac, Windows, or UNIX platforms) { readily conngured for (1) collaborative document composition project, (2) collaborative Tcl/Tk debugging and compilation environment, (3) collaborative design workkows, as well as any other application-speciic …