MOVE:: component groupware foundations for collaborative virtual environments

The design of a Virtual Environment (VE) is a distributed problem of multi-user access to shared resources. Such problem requires careful design decisions in order to provide a seamless system infrastructure capable of supporting flexible interactions in the shared scenarios.The complexity of this domain has led to intricate software systems that provide ad-hoc solutions to specific problems. Furthermore, many of them have gone to a dead end, due to their non-extensible design and their lack of code and module reuse.This paper presents a VE that is constructed on top of a component groupware framework. Our major aim is to provide an extensible infrastructure offering a set of collaborative services in a seamless way. At the conceptual level, it provides essential collaborative services: shared sessions, support for synchronous and asynchronous components, security, coordination, and a server-side awareness infrastructure. At the architectural level, the framework is constructed on top of a middleware integration platform and uses high performance publish/subscribe notification services. Finally, we present the advantages and limitations of this approach.