Egret

Participants

CSDL: Philip Johnson, Rosemary Andrada, Dadong Wan, Danu Tjahjono, Cam Moore, Robert Brewer.

Affiliates: NSF

Summary

From 1990-1996, CSDL research involved the ongoing construction of computer-supported cooperative work applications, including a collaborative learning environment (CLARE), a collaborative software review system (CSRS), a collaborative hypertext authoring environment (AEN), a collaborative messaging environment (Flashmail), a collaborative editor (Shemacs), and a collaborative filtering environment (URN). The Egret framework emerged from our goal to avoid the problem of code replication and application brittleness across these various application domains.

Egret implements a multi-client, multi-server, multi-agent architecture. Egret clients and agents are implemented by a 15 KLOC extension to XEmacs, the X-window Emacs editor. Egret servers are implemented by a 15 KLOC system written in C++.

Egret provides both low and high level storage and communication facilities for the development of (primarily textual) cooperative work applications. Data representations range from unstructured binary storage, to schema-based, typed, structured storage records, to HTML-compatible hypertext. Indexing and local replication mechanisms enable efficient "relational-style" queries over the underlying network database. Inter-process communication is implemented via TCP/IP sockets, and provides a variety of programmatic and interactive client communication facilities. Password mechanisms are provided to facilitate secure collaboration in groups dispersed across the internet. Built-in instrumentation support facilitates research and evaluation of Egret applications.

Software

Publications

Status

Complete.

Keywords

collaborative architectures, computer supported cooperative work applications