Enabling Collaboration Transparency With Computational Reflection

The conversion of legacy single-user applications to collaborative multi-user tools is a recurrent topic in groupware settings. Many works tried to achieve collaboration transparency: to enable collaborative features without modifying the source code of the single-user application. In this paper, we present a novel blackbox solution that achieves complete transparency by intercepting user interface libraries and input events. This is the first blackbox solution constructed on top of lightweight wrapper technologies (Aspect Oriented Programming) and unlike previous approaches it provides support to both AWT and Swing applications. Our solution solves four important problems: event broadcasting, management of external resources (random numbers), contextual information (telepointers) and transparent launching support. We validated our approach with several Swing-based and AWT-based tools demonstrating that our wrapper is generic and imposes very low overhead.