A Web-based Application Framework for Synchronous Collaboration

We propose a novel framework for synchronous collaborative applications. Different from the conventional approaches based on distributed synchronous objects, the proposed framework fully integrates the collaborative capability into the Web-based semantics, such as synchronized URL navigation and collaborative form editing. It is designed to cover the wide range of applications, from straight-forward Web page synchronization to complicated Web-based guided transactions. In this paper, we describe its architecture and how it is applied to building commercial systems such as Web-collaboration Kiosk systems. Typical application development scenario derived from building these systems will also be described.