PUBLICATION
Analyzing the Suitability of Web Applications for a Single-User to Multi-User Transformation
Type
Conference Paper
Year
2013
Authors
Research Area
Web Engineering
Event
World Wide Web Conference 2013
Published in
Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web
Download
Abstract
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) 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/ .