Exploiting single-user web applications for shared editing: a generic transformation approach

  • Authors:

  • Matthias Heinrich;Franz Lehmann;Thomas Springer;Martin Gaedke

  • Affiliations:

  • SAP AG, Dresden, Germany;SAP AG, Dresden, Germany;Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany;Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In the light of the Web 2.0 movement, web-based collaboration tools such as Google Docs have become mainstream and in the meantime serve millions of users. Apart from established collaborative web applications, numerous web editors lack multi-user support even though they are suitable for collaborative work. Enhancing these single-user editors with shared editing capabilities is a costly endeavor since the implementation of a collaboration infrastructure (accommodating conflict resolution, document synchronization, etc.) is required. In this paper, we present a generic transformation approach capable of converting single-user web editors into multi-user editors. Since our approach only requires the configuration of a generic collaboration infrastructure (GCI), the effort to inject shared editing support is significantly reduced in contrast to conventional implementation approaches neglecting reuse. We also report on experimental results of a user study showing that converted editors meet user requirements with respect to software and collaboration qualities. Moreover, we define the characteristics that editors must adhere to in order to leverage the GCI.