NC State University

Speaker: Franc Brglez, Computer Science, NCSU

Class Experiences in Writing Collaborative Client/Server Applications for the Internet

Abstract: The class brought together a team of seven students, each with some programming experience under UNIX, WindowsNT, and MacOS. The class expectation was that each student will have the opportunity to learn sufficiently about the rudiments of Tcl/Tk programming during the first few weeks of the course so that the remainder of the course could be devoted to a major joint class project that will apply and extend the principles of client/server programming under Tcl/Tk -- as now described in the joint paper.

A specific definition of the collaborative project itself molded the project: An entity with distributed participants, distributed data sets and libraries, distributed tool sets and libraries, and objectives to be met by completing well-defined sequences of tasks -- assigned by the the project leader, and subject to collaborative project activity and reviews.

The benefits of making Tcl/Tk the rapid prototyping language of choice for this class project cannot be overstated. Without it, the scope of the class project would have been reduced significantly. The major milestones are:

• proficiency in Tcl/Tk that allowed each student to manipulate data and widgets, apply socket programming principles, and create a progression of client/server applications, from simple textbook cases to features that are unique to the class project.
• a unique client/server architecture prototype, partitioned into an Asynchronous Group Server (AGS) and a Synchronizing Group Server (SGS) -- driven by and matched to the stated concept of a collaborative project.
• a universal AGS server that support any number of user-configurable AGS clients (accessible through a Web-browser from a Mac, Windows, or UNIX platforms) -- configured for (1) collaborative document composition project, (2) collaborative Tcl/Tk debugging and compilation environment, (3) collaborative design workflow.
• experimental prototype of an SGS/AGS server and client architecture, giving the participants the power to re-configure the stand-alone client into a situation-specific collaborative client -- obviating the need to re-write the stand-alone client for a specific collaborative application.

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