Practical experiences of designing a distributed collaborative system

The PI-CEE(Project Information Cooperative Enterprise Environment) system is a project information management system that uses Java applications and is based on the model-based distributed collaborative work support concept. It is designed to achieve optimal performance with model-based Java applications for application to large-scale projects. We applied the first prototype of PI-CEE to a large-scale project. The result was twofold: memory use and response time worsened with increases in data quantity. Our design concept is based on doing four things: designing a server transaction system and database, implementing client cache management, making improvements in server-client communication, and multiple-server replication. We discuss our system, the general lessons that we learned from its application, and the problems we encountered and their resolutions.