Villa: an event based middleware for real-time collaboration on the Internet

It is becoming increasingly clear that the next generation of Internet applications will involve the efficient exchange of real-time information. The current Internet technology does not provide sufficient support for such applications. Instead, the current protocols and engines on the Internet are designed for static information browsing. A primary goal of this research project is to study the requirements of Internet applications requiring extensive real-time information exchange and to develop a framework and the required middleware which can be used to write such scalable collaborative applications over the Internet. This paper describes the architecture and the implementation of such a system called Villa. Villa is based on an asynchronous event-based toolkit and is designed to build scalable collaborative applications over the Internet.