NCSA Habanero -- State-of-the-art Java Collaboratory

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