A Portable and Collaborative Distributed Programming Environment

Due to recent advances in network and computing facilities, use of the Internet is becoming popular and promising in various areas such as scientific collaboration, information distribution and business processing. The need for a collaborative programming environment on the Internet is a natural extension to provide a cyber workspace for distributed software engineering and distance education, both now and into the future. We have previously introduced a distributed programming environment, and recently we have redesigned and implemented a portable distributed programming system that supports real-time multimedia communication on the Internet. This paper reports our experience adopting multimedia components on the distributed programming environment such as simultaneous multimedia outputs in the distributed systems and an efficient multimedia communication among the participants. Our work may bring a new genre of software engineering – distributed software engineering, which includes many different views from the existing techniques in configuration management and software life cycle.