Design of Distributed Collaborative Application through Service Aggregation

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is used to support loosely-coupled integration of existing applications. We are investigating the possibility of creating entirely new applications based on SOA. We present a case study for a collaborative authoring application targeting groups of around five users collaborating over the Internet. We highlight the basic requirements of the application and show how these can be fulfilled by utilizing certain services accessed through standard HTTP, Jabber and JXTA set of protocols, and off-the-shelf techniques. By measuring the performance of the application in a heterogeneous environment and by providing details of an alternate service fulfilling the application's requirement, we show that SOA-based collaborative applications can be quickly designed and deployed.