Issues in the Design of a Collaborative Distributed Operating System
Mark Parris · ACM SIGOIS Bulletin · 1994
viding mechanisms to allow unmodified existing applications to be shared. Both alternatives have advantages. Collaboration-aware applications usually provide more flexible features and can be tailored to a specific task while external mechanisms for sharing are usually much less flexible. Providing mechanisms for sharing existing applications allows users to share applications they are familiar with instead of learning a new application. Additionally, we only have to implement the conferencing service once and we immediately have a wide range of collaborative applications. By interposing a conferencing agent between the user interface and the data management portion of the application we can share an existing application without changing its appearance. The conferencing agent can multiplex and demultiplex the applications communication with its user interface(s). If there is a natural boundary, e.g. the client-server boundary in X Windows, this conferencing agent can be adde