CoWriter : converting openoffice.org writer into a real-time collaborative word processor

• Main Author: Shu, Hao Jiang.
• Other Authors: Sun Chengzheng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computing methodologies::Document and text processing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/39853
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Single-user applications are very familiar to us in the daily life. As a rapidly increasing number of people are working together on same tasks and actively share information among them, there is a growing demand in collaborative applications. Enabling single-user applications to support multi-user collaboration has the great potential to improve the usefulness application and hence increase the efficiency. In this project, a real-time multi-user application, CoWriter, is investigated and developed from a single-user word processor, OpenOffice.org. The Transparent Adaptation (TA) approach has been adopted in this project. Generally, TA adapts the application programming interface to the operational model that is supported by the core collaboration techniques, which is known as Operational Transformation (OT). It is based on the single-user application and its application programming interface to convert user inputs into Adapted Operations (AO), which will be replayed at the remote side to achieve consistency. Moreover, CoWriter is integrated with Generic Collaborative Engine, which implements OT techniques, the generic Session Manager, which is in charge of managing collaborative editing sessions, and Collaborative Document Repository Browser, which provides a user interface for clients.