A component-based design approach for collaborative distributed systems

In this paper we propose the Cooperative Component Approach (CCA), for the design of Collaborative Distributed Software (CDS). In this approach, we propose initially an analysis based on functional requirements necessary to the design of CDS. The functionalities are structured according to three functional levels: cooperation, coordination, and communication. We introduce the concept of "cooperative component" for the implementation of functional requirements into the suggested levels. The inherent aspects in the design of cooperative components are managed in a formal way by introducing a notation based on the Architecture Description Language Darwin. In order to prove its feasibility, we applied our CCA approach to the design of an application that supports the activity of collaborative document editing.