An Online Component Deployment System for Dynamic Collaborative Sessions

Component deployment within collaborative sessions is the process through which collaborative tools viewed as monolithic or composite components are made available to session members. Existing approaches dealing with this process adopt an offline exhaustive and static deployment technique. This kind of deployment is not applicable for collaboration where the session structure evolves in time and changes during the collaborative work. In this case, the component distribution is affected by session dynamics. Deploying components can be efficiently and correctly automated by using a formal session model based on collaboration graphs. In this paper, we introduce the problem of dynamic deployment for collaborative sessions, and we describe CDS, a first prototype system we have developed that supports both the initial and the subsequent deployment process according to a formal session model, while satisfying low-level constraints resulting from the heterogeneity of the target environment.