Supporting Collaboration in Distributed Design Environments using a Shared Object Space Infrastructure

Abstract

This paper adress the problem of supporting collaboration among designers in a distributed design environment. Our goal is to allow designers to work synchronously even though they are geographically dispersed. The collaboration support is based on shared object spaces as technological infrastructure and its methodology is based on Pair Programming. It was implemented using Jini/Javaspaces and it was incorporated in the Cave2 CAD framework. The implemented collaboration support is availabre as a servicee that ca be requested by the design tolls and it allows design data sharing and facilitates the experience sharing among designers. The proposed approach was validated with a case stufy on a diagram editor.