Home » Archived » Eclipse Communications Framework (ECF) » Collaborative Applications
| Collaborative Applications [message #580605] |
Tue, 15 March 2005 01:34  |
Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: carl.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Hi All,
I have just found out about the ECF, and am very interested in helping
develop it the future.
Just to let you all know, our research group has been developing
collaborative software engineering applications for the last few years.
We have at present a collaborative, realtime UML class diagramming
tool and text editor. Both tools are for java, but they could easily be
used for other languages.
All tools run in real time and can work on shared artifacts for any
number of users. Behind the scenes is a server that holds a full
semantic model of the project being developed. This server also manages
the users and artifacts within the project.
As a benefit of modeling the project as changes happen, we can produce
immediate impact reports, and also alert users when someone enters their
"neighbourhood of related code".
I see many similarities between ECF and what we have been working on,
and hopefully I can help the ECF project out... possibly by porting our
tools over to eclipse.
One issue I see at present is that whilst it is very important to have a
suitable interprocess communication layer, well defined shared model of
the software, and smart applications, the CSCW side of things is equally
important. Forgive me for not reading all of the newsgroup postings,
but has much thought as of yet gone into concurrency control, remote
user awareness and feedback, etc? If not, hopefully I can be of some
help to the application developers, and maybe even the core ECF platform
developers if user awareness is built into the core structure of ECF.
If anyone is interested in talking to me about shared SE tools, feel
free to post to this group or email me directly. I will post a screen
shot of my latest tools to:
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/sevg/toolsSS.png,
and here are a couple of recent papers related to our work:
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/papers/apsec04CAM .pdf
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/papers/acsc2005.p df
(I have noticed the names of a couple of Collaborative SE researchers in
the newgroup postings already!).
Kind regards, I look forward to working with this project, and I hope it
all goes well!
~Carl Cook,
University of Canterbury, NZ.
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| Re: Collaborative Applications [message #580643 is a reply to message #580605] |
Thu, 17 March 2005 05:28  |
 Scott Lewis
Messages: 1038
Registered: July 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Hi Carl,
Carl Cook wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have just found out about the ECF, and am very interested in helping
> develop it the future.
>
> Just to let you all know, our research group has been developing
> collaborative software engineering applications for the last few years.
> We have at present a collaborative, realtime UML class diagramming tool
> and text editor. Both tools are for java, but they could easily be used
> for other languages.
>
> All tools run in real time and can work on shared artifacts for any
> number of users. Behind the scenes is a server that holds a full
> semantic model of the project being developed. This server also manages
> the users and artifacts within the project.
>
> As a benefit of modeling the project as changes happen, we can produce
> immediate impact reports, and also alert users when someone enters their
> "neighbourhood of related code".
>
> I see many similarities between ECF and what we have been working on,
> and hopefully I can help the ECF project out... possibly by porting our
> tools over to eclipse.
This would be wonderful. Your work sounds very exciting...is it
available in some for us to read about and/or play with?
It sounds from your quick description to be pretty close to what we've
been doing with using the ECF 'shared object' model to distribute
changes to EMF models. One of the team members (Peter Nehrer) has been
focusing on creating shared objects that can have various policies
associated with them (i.e. via extension points) to control the runtime
model change serialization and distribution policy...e.g. when changes
are serialized and distribute to whom, etc.
The ECF sharedobjectcontainer model is sufficiently generic that it does
not dictate where the authoritative copy of a sharedobject lives...that
is, in some cases the primary copy of the sharedobject might live on a
server process (as it sounds like your system currently does), but other
possibilities are allowed within the
sharedobjectcontainer...specifically that individual peers may be
authoritative about the creation/state changes of a given sharedobject.
Of course, ECF containers can contain shared objects with different
assumptions...e.g some sharedobjects may be 'server-based', others
client based. The interesting thing is these shared objects can share
network resources (e.g. for communicating shared object state changes),
and they can share access to either separate of shared user interfaces.
The presentation of the underlying distributed model changes are
completely up to the application programmer.
So, for example, a single application might actually consist of a
server-based distributed model, that updates in real time, and it may
also consist of a 'peer-based' model that updates in real time (or not).
>
> One issue I see at present is that whilst it is very important to have a
> suitable interprocess communication layer, well defined shared model of
> the software, and smart applications, the CSCW side of things is equally
> important.
Agreed.
Forgive me for not reading all of the newsgroup postings,
> but has much thought as of yet gone into concurrency control, remote
> user awareness and feedback, etc?
Certainly a lot of thought has been given to concurrency control and
multithreading by me and others on the team...in that the provider
implementation support basic failure detection and reporting...which is
critical for keeping distributed state synchronized .
RE: remote user awareness, etc...our initial (very small) set of
applications have been focussed around real-time user presence/awareness
updates, real-time chat, shared editors, and such. We've also
implemented an xmpp (jabber) provider, and a very very simple Jabber IM
client. We are hopefull that we will soon be doing more work
specifically on providing abstract APIs for communicating things like
user presence. We would like to provide such apis in a completely
cross-protocol way (i.e. so that application programmers would only need
to interact with a 'presence component'...and this presence component
could then use xmpp, or other protocols to actually communicate the
presence info to others.
If not, hopefully I can be of some
> help to the application developers, and maybe even the core ECF platform
> developers if user awareness is built into the core structure of ECF.
We are just beginning to think about creating various components (and
associated APIs) for higher-level concepts like user awareness,
distributed model distribution and update policies, file sharing, other
interesting app domains like application sharing, chat, etc. There are
actually a fair number of 'communications components' that one can come
up with...and we think that the notion of a container and 'shared
objects' (basically and java object with any code and state) provides a
good distributed component model...particularly when combined with the
OSGI bundle and service model.
>
> If anyone is interested in talking to me about shared SE tools, feel
> free to post to this group or email me directly. I will post a screen
> shot of my latest tools to:
>
> http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/sevg/toolsSS.png,
>
> and here are a couple of recent papers related to our work:
>
> http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/papers/apsec04CAM .pdf
> http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/carl.cook/papers/acsc2005.p df
Thanks Carl...I will take a look as quickly as possible. If I don't get
immediately back to you it's not because of lack of interest...but
only because of lack of time ;-). So please contact us directly (email
to me at slewis@composent.com, etc). If you are able and willing to
participate on ECF (i.e. able to make your work available under EPL)
then I'm sure we would be able to work out a way to have it/you advance
ECF development.
>
> (I have noticed the names of a couple of Collaborative SE researchers in
> the newgroup postings already!).
Yes, in a former life I did some collaborative systems research (e.g.
cscw etc)...and we somehow seem to stick together :-).
Thanks...please do keep in direct touch and let me know what sort of
effort you would be able/willing to engage in assisting with the ECF
project. Although we want to keep the project reasonably small, there
are a lot of different threads and sub-projects that we would like to
attack and don't currently have the resources to do so...so your
participation would be very welcome.
Thanks,
Scott
>
> Kind regards, I look forward to working with this project, and I hope it
> all goes well!
>
> ~Carl Cook,
> University of Canterbury, NZ.
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