A Development Framework for Collaborative Applications Based on the Access Grid

Developing collaborative applications presents a challenge in solving the communication and synchronization problems. In this paper, we introduce a framework created to assist the developers. The framework takes the advantage of the access grid (AG) components, venue server, venue client and event channel, aiming to build a collaborative environment. In addition, the framework contains two user interface components, a wizard providing an interface to import new applications, and a main frame listing all the applications developed upon the framework. For a testing task, we implemented some collaborative applications using this framework. And the examples demonstrate that the framework enables the users to develop collaborative applications conveniently and efficiently