A Guide to Map Application Components to Support Multi-User Real-Time Collaboration

Building a collaborative application from scratch is a hard task. In the last decade many advances have been made to help the developers to construct collaborative applications, however little effort has been made to extend existing single-user applications to support real-time collaboration. This work presents a mapping from the main components of an existing single-user model-view-controller based application to multiuser real-time components of the collaborative application. The mapping allows reuse of existing single-user components by facilitating the construction of collaborative applications. This paper describes the mapping, the extension of an existing single-user application and discusses an experiment of the prototype application where the mapping was applied