A CASE-STUDY OF CES - A DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIVE EDITING SYSTEM IMPLEMENTED IN ARGUS

As distributed configurations of high-powered workstations connected by networks become prevalent, tools for writing distributed programs take on increasing importance. This paper describes our experience implementing CES, a distributed Collaborative Editing System. CES was written in Argus, a language that was designed to support the construction of reliable distributed programs,and exhibits a number of requirements typical of distributed applications. Our experience illustrates numerous areas in which the support provided by Argus for meeting those requirements was quite helpful, hut also identifies several areas in which the support provided by Argus was inadequate. Some of the problems arise because of the distinction in Argus (and in other systems) between locally and remotely accessible data and the mechanisms provided for implementing each. Others arise because of limitations of the mechanisms for building user-defined data types. We discuss the problems we encountered, including their implications for other systems. We also suggest solutions to the problems, or in some cases further research directed at finding solutions.