An Internet collaborative environment for sharing Java applications

In the Internet community there is a strong demand for platform-independent collaboration software. Java is developed with the major design goals of being a platform-independent, and Internet-oriented programming language. We show how a group of Internet users can share single-user Java applications for synchronous collaboration. Our approach is based on a replicated tool architecture in which each participant runs a copy of the application and the activity of each user is multicast to all the participants in the conference. We have developed a system called Java Collaborative Environment (JCE), on which the Java's Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) is extended such that mouse and keyboard events are intercepted and distributed among all copies of the shared Java application. In addition we provide an infrastructure and a simple interface for session management and floor control.