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Intro: Project History
The concept of Web conferencing is very familiar. Regardless of the variety of names used to refer to this solution domain (e-meeting, webinar, live-meeting, online meeting, etc), vendors for such functionality provide a platform that supports the delivery of training, or presentations via the Internet. In a web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet. These web conferences can range from a one-way presentation to an interactive session that incorporates a variety of collaborative features that are relavent to the meeting topic. In most cases these web conferences can be augmented by teleconference calls and there are web conferencing technologies on the market that have incorporated the use of VoIP audio or vChat technologies, to allow for a completely web-based mode of communications.
The issue with these web conferencing solutions is that they are platform or solution centric and not data centric. People meet to interact and discuss a given topic which is typically associated with some specific data domain. Web application developers generally create standalone (single user) applications that combine form and function specific to a given data domain. The Cooperative Web Framework provides web developers with the ability to incorporate support for simultaneous content interactions among meeting attendees without the need to grant control or to pass the baton. Essentially, the framework allows a web application to be used standalone or in a session without requiring anything more than a broadband connected device with a standard browser.
The Cooperative Web Framework is a Dojo Foundation Project as it leverages several existing projects, specifically Dojo Core Modules from the Dojo Toolkit. It also includes a CometD Java Server plus a Python server, which is based on Facebook’s Tornado Server, that implements the cometD Bayeux protocol. Additionally, the framework makes use of other web standards such as WebSockets and the OpenAjax Hub.
Our technology offers a standards based web development API for extending the browser for real-time collaboration across all browsers regardless of device or platform. The cooperative web API supports simultaneous content interactions among web meeting attendees. It also support the concept of Bots which are proxies to real-time events that are external from an application session. These server-side modules allow session participants to have application centric content pushed into the application on behalf of each attendee.
The initial project source was derived from a corporate contribution from IBM's Emerging Internet Technologies Organization, which began working on Cooperative Web concepts in early 2008. They built a Telepresence Lite solution based on cooperative web concepts called, Project Blue Spruce (PBS). While development of PBS complete dat the end of 2012, PBS is currently available from IBM as a commercialized asset for Telepresence Lite solutions.