1 | Simple server based collaboratories as discussed previously can be now fairly easily built from scratch in Java using JDK networking, multithreading and windowing support. |
2 | More advanced Java servers and collaboratories are now also become available --- here we report on two state-of-the-art products: NCSA Habanero collaboratory and MIT/W3C Jigsaw Java server. |
3 | NCSA Habanero offers Java tools for extending single-user Java applications to collaboratory environments. |
4 | The toolkit offers the full support for base networking such as routing, arbitration, synchronization and for Java object 'marshalling' (i.e.sending them across the net). |
5 | The base procedure is to split an existing application into common and client-specific objects and to marshall the latter. |
6 | Several popular Java applets have been already collaboratively distributed using Habanero, including NPAC Visible Human applet, UIUC Weather Visualizer, and several chat, whiteboard and game applications. |
7 | An attractive merger is to combine NCSA Habanero with MIT/W3C Jigsaw server towards a general purpose scalable multiserver Web collaboratory. |