What You See Is What I Saw: Applications of Stateless Client Systems in Asynchronous CSCW
S.F. Li, A. Hopper · 1998
Thin-client systems are becoming favourable in today's computing, as today's working environment tends to be mobile and ubiquitous. Stateless-client systems not only conform to the thin-client paradigm, but also extend to free the client completely from preserving any system state. In the stateless-client systems, the application processing takes place in the server, only changes to the user interface are sent to the client. Therefore, the client can connect to and disconnect from the server arbitrarily from different endpoints, and every time it connects, it receives the user interface with exactly the same state as when the system was last accessed. This technology of preserving all system state in the server and sending only the user interface to the client in the form of pixel images has motivated us to incorporate it in our CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) tools to support asynchronous as well as synchronous collaboration. Our paper will focus on how we make use of the statelessclient systems to support asynchronous CSCW on the World-wide Web by recording the changes to the user interface during a work session and replaying the session for any collaborative participant who is temporally separated. The recorded medium is a stream of rectangles containing pixel data of the user interface. Experiments show that the new lossless medium in general consumes less storage space than required by an equivalent lossy MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) video.