A skeleton-based approach for the design and implementation of distributed virtual environments

It has long been argued that developing distributed software is a difficult and error-prone activity. Based on previous work on design patterns and skeletons, this paper proposes a template-based approach for the high-level design and implementation of distributed virtual environments (DVEs). It describes a methodology and its associated tool, which includes a user interface, a performance analyser and an automatic code generation facility. It also discusses some preliminary results on a surgical training system.