Prototyping synchronous group applications

Cooperative team-based activities are changing the nature of work. Current frameworks provide the necessary base communication and coordination tools but require application designers to handle low-level details such as defining a communication protocol. They also provide limited support for prototyping such applications and experimenting with alternative designs. We introduce a sharing style called strong sharing. Its implementation in Object World insulates application designer from low-level communication details. CoSARA, a system built on Object World, lets application designers prototype synchronous group applications by graphically specifying the multiuser interactions. After we describe strong sharing, we describe Object World and how it facilitates building synchronous group applications. Then we describe the CoSARA design methodology for prototyping synchronous group applications and show how we used it to build a multiuser block diagram editor.<>