Transparent adaptation of single-user applications for multi-user real-time collaboration
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Exploiting single-user web applications for shared editing: a generic transformation approach
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
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Multi-user web applications like Google Docs or Etherpad are crucial to efficiently support collaborative work (e.g. jointly create texts, graphics, or presentations). Nevertheless, enhancing single-user web applications with multi-user capabilities (i.e. document synchronization and conflict resolution) is a time-consuming and intricate task since traditional approaches adopting concurrency control libraries (e.g. Apache Wave) require numerous scattered source code changes. Therefore, we devised the Generic Collaboration Infrastructure (GCI) [8] that is capable of converting single-user web applications non-invasively into collaborative ones, i.e. no source code changes are required. In this paper, we present a catalog of vital application properties that allows determining if a web application is suitable for a GCI transformation. On the basis of the introduced catalog, we analyze 12 single-user web applications and show that 6 are eligible for a GCI transformation. Moreover, we demonstrate (1) the transformation of one qualified application, namely, the prominent text editor TinyMCE, and (2) showcase the resulting multi-user capabilities. Both demo parts are illustrated in a dedicated screencast that is available at http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/demo/TinyMCE/.