Rendezvous: an architecture for synchronous multi-user applications

  • Authors:
  • John F. Patterson;Ralph D. Hill;Steven L. Rohall;Scott W. Meeks

  • Affiliations:
  • Bellcore, 445 South St, Morristown, NJ;Bellcore, 445 South St, Morristown, NJ;Bellcore, 445 South St, Morristown, NJ;Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • CSCW '90 Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

Rendezvous is an architecture for creating synchronous multi-user applications. It consists of two parts: a run-time architecture for managing the multi-user session and a start-up architecture for managing the network connectivity. The run-time architecture is based on a User Interface Management System called MEL, which is a language extension to Common Lisp providing support for graphics operations, object-oriented programming, and constraints. Constraints are used to manage three dimensions of sharing: sharing of underlying information, sharing of views, and sharing of access. The start-up architecture decouples invoking and joining an application so that not all users need be known when the application is started. At present, the run-time architecture is completed and running test applications. As a first test of the complete Rendezvous architecture, we will implement a multi-user card game by the end of the summer.