Enriching web applications with collaboration support using dependency injection

Abstract

Web-based collaboration tools such as Google Docs are pervasive in our daily lives since they have proven to efficiently support joint work of distributed teams. Nevertheless, the development of web-based groupware systems is a time-consuming and costly task because developers either have to become familiar with specific groupware libraries or are asked to re-implement concurrency control services (i.e. document synchronization, conflict resolution). Therefore, we propose a dependency injection mechanism using declarative annotations to incorporate concurrency control services into web applications. Instead of adopting comprehensive libraries or implementing application-specific components, synchronization capabilities are integrated in a lightweight and rapid fashion. To validate the approach, we enriched the widely-adopted Knockout framework with dependency injection facilities and transformed two Knockout-based applications into collaborative ones. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.