Distributed scheduling of meetings: a case study in prototyping distributed applications

The authors have developed a combined meeting-scheduling cum calendar-management system called CAMEL, that eliminates the tedium of scheduling a meeting. CAMEL uses a hunting feature that enables the tracking of user logins. The approach towards software development is generative as well as declarative, through extensive use of toolkits and reusable software. The authors describe the essential ingredients of CAMEL. It is a fairly complex distributed application using a distributed database and distributed user related information such as preference parameters. Tools from RAPIDS toolkit, especially remote procedure call subsystem, n-party interaction subsystem, are heavily used to produce this application. It also uses many services provided by RAPIDS, such as name server, user information server etc. To maintain consistency of distributed data the application makes use of the 2-phase commit and 2-phase locking primitives provided by RAPIDS