Flexible Shared Windows

本研究关注支持多用户界面的基础结构。评估这种基础设施的两个重要标准是(a)应用程序-用户交互和(b)用户-用户共享所支持范例的灵活性。目前，基础设施要么提供很大的交互灵活性，但共享灵活性有限，要么提供很大的共享灵活性，但交互灵活性有限。共享窗口系统提供了最大的交互灵活性，它允许多个用户共享单个逻辑窗口。然而，这些系统不提供共享灵活性。本研究的假设是，在不降低这些系统的交互灵活性的情况下，显著提高这些系统的共享灵活性是可能的。本研究确定了新的软件抽象和架构来建立这一假设，并使用了一种实验方法，其中新概念被实现并用于验证实验。如果成功，它将导致一种新的基础设施，自动满足大量多用户用户界面的共享需求，而这些用户界面目前必须以高昂的编程成本手动实现。

This research concerns infrastructure for supporting multiuser- interfaces. Two important criteria for evaluating such an infrastructure are the flexibility of the supported paradigms for (a) application-user interaction and (b) user-user sharing. Currently, an infrastructure offers either great interaction flexibility but limited sharing flexibility, or great sharing flexibility but limited interaction flexibility. The maximum interaction flexibility is offered by shared window systems, which allow multiple users to share a single logical window. However, these systems offer no sharing flexibility. The hypothesis of this research is that it is possible to significantly increase the sharing flexibility of these systems without reducing their interaction flexibility. This research identifies new software abstractions and architectures for establishing this hypothesis and uses an experimental method wherein the new concepts are implemented and used in validation experiments. If successful, it will lead to a new kind of infrastructure that automatically meets the sharing needs of a large class of multiuser user-interfaces that must today be implemented manually at great programming costs.