The success of groupware software largely depends on its capability for being reused in different collaborative scenarios without requiring significant software development efforts or user technical involvement. During the last decade several toolkits, frameworks, and specialized middleware software layers have been proposed as potential solutions to the groupware reusability problem. Those solutions cover common groupware functionality such as group formation and management, group awareness, shared workspace management, etc. This paper is focused on the reusable support to one of these common functionalities: the so-called object-level coordination that deals with multiple participants’ sequential or simultaneous access to the same set of shared objects in a collaborative setting. The paper compares existing object-level coordination proposals and analyzes their capabilities and level of reuse. Starting from that analysis, and using a bottom-up approach, the paper also proposes a h...
Miguel A. Gomez-Hernandez, Juan I. Asensio-P&eacut