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Distributed and Self-organizing Systems
Distributed and Self-organizing Systems

PUBLICATION

Exploiting Annotations for the Rapid Development of Collaborative Web Applications

Type

Conference Paper

Year

2013

Authors

heinrich

Franz Josef Grüneberger

Franz Josef Grüneberger

Thomas Springer

Thomas Springer

gaedke

Research Area

Web Engineering

Event

World Wide Web Conference 2013

Published in

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web

Download

PDF

Abstract

Web application frameworks are a proven means to accelerate the development of interactive web applications. However, implementing collaborative real-time applications like Google Docs requires specific concurrency control services (i.e. document synchronization and conflict resolution) that are not included in prevalent general-purpose frameworks like jQuery or Knockout. Hence, developers have to get familiar with specific collaboration frameworks (e.g. ShareJS) which substantially increases the development effort. To ease the development of collaborative web applications, we propose a set of source code annotations representing a lightweight mechanism to introduce concurrency control services into mature web frameworks. Those annotations are interpreted at runtime by a dedicated collaboration engine to sync documents and resolve conflicts. We enhanced the general-purpose framework Knockout with a collaboration engine and conducted a developer study comparing our approach to a traditional concurrency control library. The evaluation results show that the effort to incorporate collaboration capabilities into a web application can be reduced by up to 40 percent using the annotation-based solution.

Reference

Heinrich, Matthias; Grüneberger, Franz J.; Springer, Thomas; Gaedke, Martin: Exploiting Annotations for the Rapid Development of Collaborative Web Applications. Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 551-560, 2013.



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