The Web has evolved from a static hypermedia system with limited expressiveness into a collection of services provided at different levels and is increasingly being perceived as critical to enterprise computing architectures. Development of Collaborataion Environments are amongst the most promising fields of new Web-applications built from these existing services using support infrastructures. First generation Collaborative systems were represented by custom Java based collaboratory server technologies such as NCSA Habanero or JavaSoft JSDA, with the former providing for sharing of state and the latter providing a Shared Framework at the data level. Both these approaches were socket based, thus allowing for realtime communication. However they share the disadvantage of being low-level mechanisms, and requiring the provision of a messaging protocol as well as the message transport. What would really obviate this is a direct object-to-object communication mechanism that would allow objects to call others' methods directly The recent onset of distributed object and/or component technologies opens new and interesting avenues for standards based collaboratory infrastructures.

However, selecting a specific direction in the exploding field of distributed object and component technologies is far from being an easy task, illustrated very well both by the myraid options and the uncertainty of overall direction in the field. The questions the we pose ourseleves is whether the Web could serve as an infrastructure for both developing and implementing business applications in a, possibly globall, distributed and collaborative business environment. In the approach to answer the question, we adopt the integrative methodology i.e. we setup a multiple-standards based framework in which the best assets of various approaches complement each other. Java Distributed Collaborative Environment as the name suggests is a Distributed Collaborative environment, implemented using both CORBA and RMI. In the sections that follow I intend to explore and contrast the rationale driving these two approaches, and the overall design of the system. In the end we take examples, which are technology demonstrations,and see how various collaboration issues are dealt with.