Rapid development of distributed applications using high-level communication support

This paper proposes a communication system that enables simple and fast development of network support for multi-user applications. Even though existing middleware and development tools provide much functionality to realize distributed applications, they are purely low-level services passing most development responsibility to developers or too specialized for a specific application. The challenging issue is how to provide sufficient support and general high-level mechanisms using middleware for the rapid development of distributed multi-user applications. Our approach addresses various possibilities of the communication architecture, user membership management, content transmission mechanism and event management to meet different networking and interaction requirements of multiple users. The proposed middleware supports these features with several options through application-level APIs and configuration. Thus, the different interaction needs of a multi-user application can be easily and quickly accomplished from the developers' view point. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.