I have come across this technique or technology that allows real-time collaboration for single user applications both desktop and web-based. I first read about it thinking of trying to do application sharing with Google docs as discussed in earlier post (Application Sharing with Software as a Service (SaaS) for Use in Live Virtual Classroom ’11). My understanding on this topic may not be fully clear now, but I want to note it down anyway so that I may keep track of progress.
So far as I understand is that it orignaly started with collaboration of text documents and the basic system would be based on insert and delete operation. It would also deal with consistency maintenance, locking, conflict resolution and other functions that arise in group editing. There are solutions for different types of application such CoWord, CoAutoCad and others that enable specific single user applications to be used in real-time collaboration.
These projects would build on and extends the Transparent Adaptation (TA) technology as noted from the CoAutoCad. The CoWord and CoPowerPoint projects may also be build on this. The TA architecture consists of three components.
- Single-user Application (SA) provides conventional single-user AutoCAD functionalities and interface features, but has no knowledge about multi-user collaboration
- The Collaboration Adaptor (CA), which bridges the single-user application with the underlying GCE (see below). T CA component uses the SA API (Application Programming Interface) to augment the SA with collaboration capabilities without accessing the source code of the SA.
- Generic Collaboration Engine (GCE), which provides application-independent collaboration capabilities in consistency maintenance, concurrency control, group awareness, interaction control, etc. The GCE component can be shared by a wide range of TA-based collaborative applications.
Here is a video on a presentation titled “issues and Experiences in Designing Real-time Collaborative Editing Systems” on YouTube.
I thought it would be a perfect solution to use in production a replicated architecture desktop sharing system for use in a virtual classroom with bandwidth constraints.
