Reusable awareness widgets for collaborative web applications - A non-invasive approach

Abstract

Creating awareness about other users' activities in a shared workspace is crucial to support efficient collaborative work. Even though the development of awareness widgets such as participant lists, telepointers or radar views is a costly and complex endeavor, awareness widget reuse is largely neglected. Collaborative applications either integrate specific awareness widgets or leverage existing awareness toolkits which require major source code adaptations and thus, are not suited to rapidly enrich existing web applications. Therefore, we propose a generic awareness infrastructure promoting an accelerated, cost-efficient development of awareness widgets as well as a non-invasive integration of awareness support into existing web applications. To validate our approach, we demonstrate the integration of three developed awareness widgets in four collaborative web editors. Furthermore, we expose insights about the development of reusable awareness widgets and discuss the limitations of the devised awareness infrastructure. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.