Supporting Reuse, Composition, and Automation in a Collaboration Infrastructure

研究人员正在开发一种基础设施，它支持a)协作应用程序的功能和体系结构的自动生成，b)现有程序的重用，以及c)用定制组件轻松替换基础结构提供的组件。这项研究可以产生两种影响。首先，它可以为应用程序程序员提供一条逐步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，并逐渐微调那些适合协作访问的工具的功能和架构。其次，它可以让完整的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研究。特别是，他们正在使用他们的基础设施和现有的单用户软件重新实施成功的协作系统设计。他们正在评估他们的基础设施对以下方面的支持程度：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，ii)通过确定组件在协作系统之间共享的程度来进行组合，以及iii)通过确定在实施工作中需要多少工作来实现自动化。

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.