Supporting Reuse, Composition, and Automation in a Collaboration Infrastructure

研究人员正在开发一种基础设施，支持a）自动生成协作应用程序的功能和架构，B）重用现有程序，以及c）轻松替换基础设施提供的组件与自定义组件。这项研究可能会产生两种影响。首先，它可以为应用程序员提供一条渐进式开发协作应用程序的途径，使他们能够快速发现不适合协作访问的工具，并逐步微调那些适合协作访问的工具的功能和架构。 其次，它可以让完整协作应用程序和基础设施的开发人员成为单个组件的构建者，共享分布式系统、事务、用户界面和实时通信等不同领域的复杂设计和实现。研究人员正在使用现有的协作系统来指导他们的调查。特别是，他们正在使用其基础设施和现有的单用户软件重新实现成功的协作系统设计。他们正在评估他们的基础设施支持的程度：i）通过确定需要对现有软件进行多少更改才能使其与基础设施组件一起工作来确定重用，ii）通过确定他们实现的协作系统之间共享组件的程度来确定组合，iii）通过确定在实现工作中需要多少工作来确定自动化。

The researchers are developing an infrastructure that supports a) automatic generation of the functionality and architecture of a collaborative application, b) reuse of existing programs, and c) easy substitution ofinfrastructure-provided components with custom ones. This research can have two kinds of impact. First, it can give application programmers a path for incrementally developing a collaborative application, enabling them to quickly discover tools that do not lend themselves to collaborative access and gradually fine-tune the functionality and architecture of those that do. Second, it can allow developers of complete collaborative applications and infrastructures to become builders of individual components, sharing complex designs and implementations in diverse areas such as distributed systems, transactions, user-interfaces, and real-time communication.The researchers are using existing collaboration systems to guide their investigation. In particular, they are re-implementing successful designs of collaboration systems using their infrastructure and existing single-user software. They are evaluating how well their infrastructure supports i) reuse by determining how many changes are required to existing software to make it work with infrastructure components, ii) composition by determining the extent to which components are shared among the collaborative systemsthey implement, and iii) automation by determining how much effort is required in the implementation effort.