Enabling end-users to individually share parts of composite web applications

Abstract

Support for collaborative work by software or web applications is well studied for years, but yet no approach exists which allow end-users with no or limited programming skills to build custom groupware applications for individual collaboration needs. Due to an increasing number of resources, APIs, and services within the web, creating new web applications nowadays can be simplified by just combining these atomic building blocks. Meanwhile, an increasing number of mashup platforms enable non-programmers to build situational web applications by their own by facilitating recommendation techniques and visual abstraction layers. But, none of these approaches cover sufficient support for multi-user scenarios. As one major foundation for collaboratively building and using composite web application (CWAs), we propose a triple-based permission management concept in line with a target group specific UI support. Thereby, users are empowered to share either applications, components or parts of them in the form of single application features or data. Additionally, previously selected private data can be excluded from being shared. We implemented the approach within our distributed runtime environment for CWAs and proved by two user studies that the basic concepts as well as the UI guidance work as expected.