Synchronous groupware applications support people collaborating in real time over a distance. The world wide web supports asynchronous collaboration by allowing people to share distributed information repositories. This paper presents a new technique for creating applications that tightly integrate synchronous groupware with the world wide web. The key points of the technique are: two new HTML tags allow synchronous views to be embedded within WWW pages without programming; lightweight connection of WWW documents and applications is achieved through the use of constraints, and the use of the model-view-controller architecture allows easy integration of applications and WWW pages that were developed separately. This technique has been demonstrated in the context of the new multiuser GroupScape HTML browser, developed using the Clock groupware development toolkit. KEYWORDS CSCW, Groupware Development, HTML, WWW
T. C. Nicholas Graham