Supporting High Coupling and User-Interface Flexibility

Abstract

Abstract. Collaborative systems that automate the sharing of programmer-defined user interfaces offer limited coupling flexibility, typically forcing all users of an application to share all aspects of the user interfaces. Those that automatically support high coupling flexibility are tied to a narrow set of predefined user-interfaces. We have developed a framework that provides high-level and flexible coupling support for arbitrary, programmer-defined user interfaces. The framework refines an abstract layered model of collaboration with structured application layers and automatic acquisition, transformation, and processing of updates. It has been used to easily provide flexible coupling in complex, existing single-user software and shown to support all known ways to share user-interfaces. Coupling flexibility comes at the cost of a small amount of additional programming. We have carefully crafted the framework to ensure that this overhead is proportional to the degree of coupling flexibility desired.

Introducing collaboration in single-user applications through the Centralized Control architecture

“…CoPowerPoint [32], [33] This approach has been applied as case study to introduce collaboration in GraphDraw [34]. In the case study, the users may wish to share the graph that they are creating but not their CoArgoUML [35].…”

Collecticiels

“…Toutefois, de récents travaux s'intéressent au couplage de l'interaction avec, par exemple, un point de vue système visant à réduire les effets indésirables de la latence d'un réseau sur l'interaction, notamment les mouvements fantômes des objets graphiques, dans une situation de couplage fort pour des interactions réalisées en temps réel [13]. D'autres traitent du couplage à un niveau plus abstrait en le considérant au niveau modèle selon la décomposition MVC [10] ; cette approche a pour objectif de pouvoir définir le degré de couplage désiré pour chaque interacteur qui compose l'IHM. Cependant, au final, c'est le traitement du couplage de l'interaction en sortie qui est visé.…”