CoServices: A Service-based Collaboration Platform for Distributed Cooperative Applications

The availability of high performance network brings up a number of distributed cooperative applications. However, most of the current cooperative applications are developed in a certain domain, and the system design or the functional modules cannot be reused in the other application scenarios. While, after analyzing a lot of cooperative systems in different scenarios, we found that these systems contain many common modules that have similar functions. Obviously, duplicated development of these modules leads to a mass of unnecessary costs. So, in this paper we proposed a service-based collaboration platform called Co Services which provides these commons modules for new cooperative applications. To make the platform adaptive to heterogeneous scenarios, we have defined a set of interfaces using web service so that the platform can be compatible with multiple kinds of client platforms. Besides, we have built a web service based uniform data sharing model which can be used to represent different types of data and integrate various data sources. In addition, to satisfy divers need for concurrency control in different applications, we have designed a configurable concurrency control algorithm which can be customized by configuration. Last, we have developed two applications based on Co Services to validate the effectiveness of the platform.