Design And Research Of Extensible And General CSCW Development Platform

CSCW, namely Computer Supported Collaborative Work, which is a risingstudying field of a cross-discipline, has been applied widely. However, the hugedemand and the complex designing and developing procedure are a big challenge tosystem developers. Therefore, a general-purpose software environment is urgentlydemanded, and it should provide typical services of most kinds of collaborativesystems and a flexible mechanism of extensiblity, so users can conveniently developnew application systems based on such a platform. Firstly, the dissertation studies and analyses most main platforms or middlewaresof CSCW: it summarizes the beneficial studying profits of each part. Furthermore,based on the Beacon system designed by the Computer Department of TianjinUniversity, the thesis raises a research direction on extensibility of CSCW platform.Secondly, the paper proposes a scheme for platform design based on flexibleextensibility architecture. The platform has flexible extensibility in both core andapplication layers.The mechanisms and functions of group communicaton, concurrentcontrol, security control and event processing etc. can be customized or extended, sothe platform can be used to build wide CSCW applications. The protocol stack modelfor group communication can be adapted to complex and heterogeneous networkenvironment. XML-based configuration strategy separates platform kernel and theimplementation of objective systems, so it improves the reuse of kernel codes andmakes the objective systems adaptive to the changes of demand and run timeenvironment.Finally, based on the designing scheme, the thesis realizes the XBeacon system-anew version of Beacon System, and also a comprehensive test is taken for it. Adevelopment plugin for XBeacon is designed Base on Eclipse IDE, and it is used formanagement of components and life circle of CSCW applications.The last part summarizes all the research works and gives some prospect to thefurther works.