A groupware engine using UIMS methodologies (abstract)

This paper presents a groupware engine running under Microsoft's Windows developed using a User Interface Management System (UIMS). This groupware engine will demonstrate some of the important groupware features such as concurrency control, security, view control, and how these features are best implemented using a UIMS. By demonstrating these features in a groupware engine the advantages of applying the UIMS methodology will become self evident, as well as, the need for such a methodology. The main purpose of a UIMS is to separate the user interface code from the application code. This idea suits the groupware concept very well, since most of the groupware applications are built around a central host with UI clients distributed across a local area network, or worse yet, accessible only via a low-bandwidth modem line. With this in mind, we have developed a strategy for utilizing the following UIMS models to build the groupware: * Presentation Model-In this product this mcxlel is built around a SQL-based predicate engine which is used for view control, as well as, spontaneous user feedback from different UI clients in a work group. This model is based on classes defined in the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) library, but the actual application and semantic feedback from the user interface is handled by derived classes from the MFC library developed by us. * Dialog Model-The dialog language is C++ which is the same programming language as the UIMS applications, Microsoft C++ Version 7.0. Additional classes were added to describe sequential, multiple-threaded dialogs, and the state machine for other dialog models. We believe UIMS/Groupware application programmers do not want to learn another programming language, and that object-oriented paradigm should be the foundation for all dialog models in UIMS world. * Application Model-In this product the key component of this mcdel is the SQL-predicate engine. All applications communicate with the user interface modules through this simple database management system. This groupware engine utilizes the predicate engine for security and concurrency control when multiple users in a work group are all controlled from a single database management system. The groupware engine is implemented using a clientkerver architecture to minimize CPU latency. The server in this groupware engine is the database engine. There are two types of clients in this engine. One type is the UI client which serves the presentation and dialog models, and resides on the local UI machine (vs. the host machine for …