Flexibly mapping synchronous groupware architectures to distributed implementations

Design-level architectures allow developers to concentrate on the functionality of their groupware application without exposing its detailed implementation as a distributed system. Because they abstract issues of distribution, networking and concurrency control, design-level architectures can be implemented using a range of distributed implementation architectures. This paper shows how the implementation of groupware applications can be guided by the use of semantics-preserving architectural annotations. This approach leads to a development cycle that involves first developing the functionality of the application in a local-area context, then tuning its performance by setting architecture annotations. The paper concludes with timing results showing that architectural annotations can dramatically improve the performance of groupware applications.