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Simple server based collaboratories as discussed previously can be now fairly easily built from scratch in Java using JDK networking, multithreading and windowing support.
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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.
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NCSA Habanero offers Java tools for extending single-user Java applications to collaboratory environments.
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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).
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The base procedure is to split an existing application into common and client-specific objects and to marshall the latter.
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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.
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An attractive merger is to combine NCSA Habanero with MIT/W3C Jigsaw server towards a general purpose scalable multiserver Web collaboratory.
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