A proxy-based framework to support synchronous cooperation on the web

Owing to its widespread diffusion and ease of use, the Web is an attractive platform to support distributed cooperative work. The paper presents an ob ject-oriented proxy-based framework to support synchronous cooperation on t he Web. The framework implements the general-purpose mechanisms of a proxy server. Specific application-dependent functionalities have to be implement ed in a module to be installed in the proxy-framework. This leads to the im plementation of an extensible proxy-framework, which facilitates the develo pment of specific cooperative services. The paper presents and evaluates se veral applications enabling different cooperative Web activities, to confir m the effectiveness of our proposal in terms of reusability, usability and performance. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.