JACIE - an Authoring Language for the Rapid Prototyping of Collaborative Applications

With the World Wide Web (WWW) becoming the de facto standard for human-computer interaction and human-human communication, there is a need to develop net-centric, multimedia and collaborative applications. We introduce a new scripting language, JACIE, designed to support rapid prototyping and implementa- tion of such applications. The necessity to support the management of multimedia interaction and communication in collaborative applications is highlighted. JACIE facilitates such support through the concepts of channels and a collection of inter- action protocols. JACIE also features a template-based programming style, a single program for both client and server, and platform-independence by using Java as the target language. All these features characterise a desirable collaborative software engineering tool.