AN OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT FOR MULTIMEDIA COOPERATIVE INFORMATION-SYSTEMS

This paper illustrates an object-oriented programming environment, called Application Conference Interface (ACI), which has been designed in order to facilitate the implementation of cooperative information systems. It interfaces developers of cooperative applications with services provided by a software platform, called ImagineDesk. The platform offers a rich set of services which can be exploited by developers of cooperative applications in order to manage them, to exchange multimedia data and to control users' interactions according to their roles. Basically, the ACI provides a set of local abstractions of remote services. These abstractions take the form of local objects, hiding the details of the underlying physical network from the application developer. By exploiting the object-oriented paradigm, the ACI clearly confines the host environment and network constraints in few easily upgradable objects, thus resulting in a highly system-independent architecture.