Alan Dix's short courses and tutorials

You can download

  the complete tutorial notes (PDF).

  complete support materials including HyperCard stacks as Macintish binhex-ed self extracting archive (328k)

  Unix socket code examples as compressed tar (13k), zip file (12k), or individual source files (17 small files),

Main topics

• Introduction
• Software architectures for CSCW
• Groupware Toolkits
• Difficulties and debugging
• Networking Code
• Synchronous Applications
• Asynchronous Applications
• Rapid Prototyping Platforms

Abstract

There has been a recent explosion of interest in groupware and computer-supported cooperative work, both in research and in commercial systems. This is evidenced by the large number of workshops and conferences and has been recognised in the UK by the DTI/EPSRC CSCW programme. This tutorial aims to give the attendee an introduction to the process and problems of building groupware systems. The implementation parts will consider issues for both synchronous and asynchronous groupware and example of prototypes will be discussed.

The builders of groupware have to face not only the complexities of user interface building, but also issues such as distributed computing and network protocols. This can be a daunting task both for project managers and for the programmer. I hope that this tutorial will help the attendee to set the problems in perspective and avoid some of the worst pitfalls!

The tutorial will consider the choice of software architecture and its impact on system performance. We will also examine some of the difficulties of using standard graphical interface toolkits and some of the alternative groupware toolkits and programming paradigms. Finally, we will consider the low level problems of using networks and building and debugging robust and reliable groupware.

The tutorial should be suitable for both academic and industrial attendees who wish to build (or manage the building) of groupware systems. It is assumed that attendees already have some idea of the different kinds of groupware which are currently available.. The latter parts of the tutorial will assume a reasonable level of programming competence, but the use of HyperCard examples will, I hope, make it accessible to the non-expert.

The HyperCard stacks and the UNIX code used in the examples will be freely available for the attendees own personal use and further study.

Tutorial Notes

You can download the complete notes in Adobe PDF format.

Table of Contents

Agenda

Abstract

Instructor Biographies

Lecture Material

  What is Groupware

  Architectures for Groupware

Centralised architecture

Replicated architecture

Shared window architecture

  Toolkits

Graphical toolkits and shared databases

Groupware toolkits and paradigms

Shared text

  Programming groupware

Causes of failure

Network communications

  Real code

AppleEvents

UNIX sockets - simple talk

UNIX - more complex turn taking

Simple X based server

  Synchronous groupware

OXO

Two-way talk

Multi-party talk

Electronic post-it notes

  Asynchronous groupware

Simple email

Shared appointment database

  Rapid Prototyping Platforms

Bibliography

Program Listings

  AppleEvents

OXO

Talk

  UNIX sockets

Two-person talk

Basic library

Multi-party conference

Library headers

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http://www.hiraeth.com/alan/tutorials/groupware/

Alan Dix 5/9/98