GAwI: A comprehensive workspace awareness library for collaborative web applications

Abstract

In the light of the Web 2.0 movement, the rise of collaborative web applications like Google Docs lead to an enormous end-user adoption largely due to their advanced multi-user capabilities (i.e. document synchronization in real-time and sophisticated workspace awareness support). Nevertheless, the development of collaborative web applications, in particular, the implementation of workspace awareness widgets such as telepointers, radar views, etc., is costly since there are no comprehensive libraries promoting widget reuse. Therefore, we introduce the enhanced Generic Awareness Infrastructure (GAwI) allowing for an efficient development of collaborative web applications. Efficiency is fostered through GAwI's reusable set of widgets and its non-invasive integration. In this paper, we expose GAwI's enhanced widget set, verify GAwI's comprehensiveness in terms of workspace awareness and demo the GAwI integration and GAwI widgets in two widespread open-source editors. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.