GroupScape: Integrating Synchronous Groupware and the World Wide Web

Abstract

Synchronous groupware applications support people collaborating in real time over a distance. The \rworld wide web supports asynchronous collaboration by allowing people to share distributed information repositories. \rThis paper presents a new technique for creating applications that tightly integrate synchronous groupware with the \rworld wide web. The key points of the technique are: two new HTML tags allow synchronous views to be embedded \rwithin WWW pages without programming; lightweight connection of WWW documents and applications is achieved \rthrough the use of constraints, and the use of the model-view-controller architecture allows easy integration of \rapplications and WWW pages that were developed separately. This technique has been demonstrated in the context of \rthe new multiuser GroupScape HTML browser, developed using the Clock groupware development toolkit.