Supporting customized views for enforcing access control constraints in real-time collaborative web applications

Abstract

Real-time collaborative Web applications allow multiple users to concurrently work on a shared document. In addition to popular use cases, such as collaborative text editing, they can also be used for form-based business applications that often require forms to be filled out by different stakeholders. In this context, different users typically need to fill in different parts of a form. Role-based access control and entailment constraints provide means for defining such restrictions. Major challenges in the context of integrating collaborative Web applications with access control restrictions are how to support changes of the configuration of access constrained UI elements at runtime, realizing acceptable performance and update behaviour, and an easy integration with existing Web applications. In this paper, we address these challenges through a novel approach supporting constrained and customized UI views that support runtime changes and integrate well with existing Web applications. Using a prototypical implementation, we show that the approach provides acceptable update behaviour and requires only a small performance overhead for the access control tasks with linear scalability. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.