Peer-to-peer collaboration in the lively kernel
Janne Kuuskeri, Janne Lautamäki, Tommi Mikkonen · 2010
With the increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, end-user applications are moving from the desktop to the browser. More and more applications that we have come to know as desktop applications are now making their way into the web. This has made online collaboration a key aspect for many applications. Collaborative applications like Facebook, Flickr and Google Docs are just an early hint of how we can benefit from users being able to share data. Still, collaborative features are not easy to implement in web applications. Most web programming environments aim at easy user interface creation and persistence, but not for online collaboration and pushing data from one user to another. The Lively Kernel is a highly dynamic web programming platform and runtime environment developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. By utilizing the Lively Kernel platform, it is easy to implement desktop like applications for the web using JavaScript. In this paper we summarize the experiences from adding peer-to-peer collaboration into the Lively Kernel. These additions include persistent data storage, communication channels between users and user identification.