Towards real-time collaboration in user interface mashups

Recently, user interface mashups have become a popular approach for covering the long tail of end-user needs. The simple composition paradigm and rich tool support aim at enabling even non-programmers to aggregate data and application logic to solve situational business tasks. Despite of existing assistance mechanisms, both development and usage of UI mashups remain mostly a single-user activity. As a result, novices are usually left alone in case of configuration problems or unexpected errors. Furthermore, the work cannot be distributed efficiently to solve tasks faster. This paper presents an approach to make development of and interaction with mashups a collaborative process. We show, how one can extend today's composition platforms towards real-time collaboration and demonstrate the approach in the context of the open-source mashup platform Apache Rave.