Collaborative applications experience with the Bauhaus coordination language

Though extremely promising in the abstract, collaborative computing systems have not yet lived up to their full potential. Besides problems pointed out by other researchers, we blame a lack of integration that pervades the field. The collaborative computing landscape consists largely of a collection of specific groupware tools, each designed and built for a specific purpose. For the most part, applications remain isolated from, and incompatible with, each other and with a user's normal work environment. The infrastructures and toolkits that do exist for building groupware systems represent a promising approach, but tend to focus on one kind of system (e.g. synchronous or asynchronous) to the exclusion of others. To ameliorate such problems, we propose taking a coordination language-based approach to groupware construction. Our new coordination language, Bauhaus, has been used to successfully construct a variety of different kinds of groupware systems. We briefly describe the Bauhaus language and our Bauhaus system prototype. We then discuss three collaborative systems that we have built using Bauhaus: a multi-user discussion system, a meeting scheduler and a multi-user dungeon (MUD).