Design of a development environment for web-based asynchronous and synchronous integrated groupware systems

Asynchronous and asynchronous integrated multimedia conferencing system ASSIST aims for corresponding to both of realtime conferences and non-realtime conferences. Especially, it is designed for effective information sharing by storing realtime conferencing information including multimedia information such as video and audio, and by making relation to conferencing items and information for asynchronous groupware tools such as schedule/task management, e-mail, and BBS. It is significant to construct efficient development environment for ASSIST, because it requires much effort to build this kind of systems each time in compliance with various purposes or display devices. We have designed a development environment for it and developed the prototype. The prototype system is currently focused on the implementation of facilities for asynchronous type groupware, and it makes developers possible to display tables of databases with sortable links for each field into Web browser by writing only a few line statements. In addition, we have considered integration methods for asynchronous and synchronous type Web-based groupware, applying architecture of web-based slide sharing tool which we have already implemented. In this paper, we describe the design of a development environment for Web-based asynchronous and synchronous integrated groupware systems.