JETS: a Java-enabled telecollaboration system

Real-time collaboration systems, in which participants share multimedia documents and applications in real time, have been a subject of interest for many years. Recent advancements in the Internet technology such as the emergence of Java-enabled browsers, VRML, ActiveX, LiveConnect; and similar technologies have provided users with access to dynamic multimedia content and applications on the World Wide Web. Among these technologies, Java applets seem to have introduced the most exciting notion: platform-independent applications provided by the network. Using a web-browser users can now run applications dynamically off the network. From a network-centric-computing point of view, the next logical step towards collaborative environments would to be the real-time sharing of these applications. In order to achieve that, the authors have designed JETS: a generic, multiuser/collaborative system which enables the real-time sharing of Java applets through the Internet.