COMMUNICATION SUPPORT FOR COOPERATIVE WORK

Desktop conferencing and distributed graphical editing applications al low people to perform cooperative work regardless of their geographic location. One such example is the CoDraft application presented here. This collaborative system allows concurrent sketching on a shared draw ing board. The current version is implemented on top of point-to-point communication services. It is shown that these services are not well suited for cooperative applications. Therefore, a multiparty communica tion platform is proposed that manages groups of application instances and multicast messages, handles group voting and transfers files to m ore than one target site at a time. This platform greatly simplifies t he development of cooperative applications. Additionally, the platform allows the lower-level multicast functionality to be more fully explo ited, thus improving response time and throughput performance.