EXEC: An Evolvable and eXtensible Environment for Collaboration

This paper presents an evolvable and extensible environment for collaboration (EXEC), which aims to address the long-identified flexibility and reusability issues in collaborative systems. Due to the clean separation between data and control, both user interface components (data) and coordination service components (control) can be reused for developing collaborative applications and be flexibly bound at run time to address the evolutionary needs of collaboration tasks. Additionally, new collaboration tools can be easily prototyped to extend the functionality of the environment