Dominique Decouchant
Vincent Quint
Manuel Romero Salcedo
From its inception, the World Wide Web has been thought as a system that allows people to cooperate and exchange information through a wide area network. This is achieved by several multimedia documents written by different users and made available to others on distributed servers. Each document contains links to some related documents, located on other sites.
In this paper, we take a slightly different approach to cooperation. We consider several persons involved in the task of writing a single document in a cooperative way. Each person has a specific role to play in the common task and a software tool should help these people. The goal is to finally produce a large, well structured document, not simply to write several pieces of information, interconnected by various links. But some aspects of the problem we consider are very close to those considered in the World Wide Web. Therefore many solutions developed for the Web can be applied to cooperative editing.
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For studying the problems posed by cooperative editing, we have developed a
distributed application, called Alliance, which is a structured distributed
cooperative editing tool built on top of the Grif editor [5].
Alliance has been designed to allow several users, distributed on a network, to work on shared structured documents. After a first version developed for a local area network, it has recently been adapted to the World Wide Web [3]. The aim of developing Alliance on the Web was to make this application more widely available, by using long-haul networks and allowing loosely coupled cooperation. For reaching this goal, evolutions of the Alliance cooperation services were needed to take into account most of the problems posed by the Internet and to obtain acceptable performances. From the implementation point of view, the document management layer, initially based on NFS (Network File System), has been extended to the services provided by HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) [1] on the Web.
The rest of this paper is divided into two main parts. The first part presents the basic principles on which the application is based. It puts the emphasis on user roles, document fragmentation and software architecture. The second part considers the specific problems posed by a wide area network for this kind of application and it shows how the Web technology has been used for solving these problems.
When developing Alliance, the goals were to study and better understand the specific problems of cooperative editing and to develop techniques that would allow complex structured documents to be handled more efficiently in a collaborative distributed environment.
The application has been developed for networked Unix workstations. It controls several local instances of the Grif editor, running on different workstations, and allows their users to cooperate. In addition to the local editing functions inherited from Grif, it handles document storage and access to distributed documents; it offers high-level services for handling user interaction and cooperation, for defining shared document fragments, for distributing roles to users, for supporting group awareness, for updating copies of shared documents, and for controlling document consistency.
In the development of a large documentation, the way people interact with each other is well defined: the work is organized, and each team member has a different role to play in the project. Therefore a notion of role has been introduced in Alliance. For each part of a document, a user may have one of the four available roles:
The same user may have different roles on different parts of a document. He can then be authorized to modify some parts of the document, to only read some other parts and not even to see the rest. These document parts for which user play different roles are called fragments.
As an example, Figure 1 shows the displays seen by two users (A and B) editing a shared document. This document is composed of four fragments. The first fragment contains the title, the author names and affiliations. The second fragment is constituted of the abstract. The third fragment includes the introduction and the heading of section 2. The fourth and last fragment contains all remaining parts. Fragments limits are represented in both views by various icons, which also indicate the current role played by the user on each fragment.
Figure 1 - Two views of the same document
The content of the second fragment (the abstract) only appears in the view presented to user B who plays a writer role for that fragment. This fragment is accessed with the null role by user A (information is invisible). Conversely, the third fragment can only be seen by user A. The fourth fragment can be written by user B, who also act as a manager, but it can only be read by user A.
As a user may have different roles for different parts of a document, and as these roles can change, the user needs to be notified of the role he can really play on each part. This is achieved by using different colors and by inserting special active icons at each fragment limit. When the user has a null role, the corresponding parts are not displayed, but the user may notice that they exist, as numbers (section numbers, figure numbers, etc.) take hidden parts into account. Parts where the user has the reader role are displayed with a specific color that each user can choose. Parts where the user has a writer or manager role are displayed with their normal color.
Roles allocated by a manager to other users are potential roles: users are allowed to play these roles, but they are not guaranteed to be able to play them at any time. When acting on a shared document, a user plays effective roles, which may be different from his/her potential roles. This is due to two different causes:
When a user changes his/her role, when a user leaves the session, or when a manager allocates new roles, the roles of other users are subject to changes. This is the reason why the icons marking fragment limits are useful and may change dynamically.
Alliance is an asynchronous application: all users do not see exactly the same state of the document at the same time. When a writer types a single character, this character is not displayed immediately on the screen of other users. Instead, each author must validate the changes he/she has made, in order to make them available to other users. The other users may decide whether they want these changes to be displayed automatically on their screen at validation time or later. In the second case, the icons indicate that a new version of the corresponding fragment is available and the user simply clicks the icon to get the latest version of that fragment.
The document is automatically divided into fragments by the application, according to the roles assigned by managers. This division is performed in such a way that the potential role of each user having a role for a given fragment does not change along the fragment. Changing potential roles of users can then lead to a different fragmentation of a document: fragments can be divided or merged by the application. Each fragment is stored in a separate file and these files can be located on different sites.
Document fragmentation is based on document structure. Being based on Grif, Alliance uses a structured model of documents. These documents can include a variety of components such as tables and equations, which can be shared in the same way as the rest of the document. The rich logical structure allows managers to handle document sharing efficiently. It also allows to dynamically change sharing granularity, thus permitting users to change role easily. As sharing is based on a well defined structure, document consistency can be guaranteed by simple ways.
Basically, Alliance allows each user to edit locally an instance of a shared document and it allows all users sharing a document to communicate in order to be aware of the work performed by others. Therefore, two main functions can be identified in this application:
The distributed application is constituted by several instances. An instance of Alliance is the piece of software that runs on a workstation for a single user. If several users share the same workstation, then several independent Alliance instances run on it.
In the LAN version of Alliance, an instance is a single process. As shown in Figure 2, it may be viewed as a main module that controls the functions performed by other modules.
Figure 2 - Architecture of an Alliance instance
The main module controls the editing module via the Grif API. It can update a fragment for which a new version has been sent from another instance; it can ask the editor to store a local fragment in a file; it can ask the editor to prevent the user from modifying some parts of the edited document; etc.
Editing events are transmitted via the ECF (External Call Facility) by the editing module, to inform the main module about some commands performed by the user. For instance, that is the way the main module knows what part of the document is currently selected, when the user playing the manager role changes the roles of other users for the selected part. More details about the API and the ECF mechanism provided by Grif are given in [6].
The main module also receives events (callbacks) from the user interface module (OSF/Motif), when the user issues commands that do not concern editing, but cooperation, such as changing the role of other users.
Finally, the main module calls the document management module when it needs to access the fragments stored in local or remote files.
In this section, we present the main issues that have been addressed when extending the LAN version of Alliance to the Web. We focus first on the problems posed by the delays and failures that can occur in wide area networks and we discuss the impact of these problems on the architecture.
Then, we discuss the issue of user identification and management in the the context of the Internet.
Finally, we describe the document storage mechanism that allows each user to work on shared documents when all sites can communicate and exchange information, but also when some users are isolated by network failures or simply because they are away.
Porting Alliance to a wide area network implies to take into account the specific features of such networks. A WAN, such as the Internet, is composed of many sub-networks that communicate via gateways. This kind of network is inherently unreliable because of unpredictable communication delays, link failures or computer crashes. In those cases, the network can be temporarily partitioned leading to disconnection of sub-networks. For an application such as Alliance, these failures make some remote files unreachable and transmission delays unpredictable. All actions involving remote resources can cause long delays or even locks, when these remote resources are treated as if they were local. Therefore the communication support of Alliance has been separated from the part that is in charge of user interface and local editing.
Another issue in a wide area network is remote file access. We have first considered a simple solution, which would avoid to change the way files are accessed. The same service as NFS is offered in WANs by other systems, such as the Andrew File System (AFS) for instance, which hide distribution and present remote files in the same way as local files. Although it would not change the architecture, this solution has been rejected, because we were looking for a file system that is widely available and used, and that would make the installation of Alliance on any site a simple task, even for an occasional usage.
The World Wide Web satisfies these conditions. It is constituted by a number of servers that provide remote file access. A Web server can be easily installed on any computer and the software is widely available.
Web servers are based on the HTTP protocol [1]. HTTP allows on-line access to distant information using the client/server model. In the WAN version, Alliance fully exploits this model for allowing instances of the application to cooperate: each instance acts as a client and each site acts as a server. Clients send requests to servers in order to:
On the server site, the work is carried out through the Common Gateway Interface, by executing scripts.
Basically, a script is a program that can be executed for a HTTP client to perform some specific work on a server site. A script can receive information through input parameters and it can send results back to the calling client. Alliance uses a set of scripts that allow clients to get information about shared documents, or about fragments.
HTTP proposes three methods: Get, Post and Put. Get allows a client to request a document identified by its URL. Post is used to trigger execution of an existing script; a Post request is composed of the script URL and a list of input parameters to be provided to the script. Put is supposed to allow a client to write a file remotely, but very few servers implement this method, mainly for security reasons.
As the Put method is not widely available, a client must combine two methods for writing a file remotely (see Figure 3). It sends to the server a Post which starts a script sending back a Get message to the client. Then the client returns the file as the result of the Get message and the script that issued the Get message writes this file locally on the server. Due to the lack of the Put method, a HTTP server is also required on the client site.
Figure 3 - Implementation of the Put method
The following example explains how a client can obtain the list of documents owned by a remote user. First, the client builds a request containing the URL of the script GetUserDocumentList, and the login name of the remote Unix user as parameters. Then, it invokes the HTTP Post method and the script is executed on the server site. The script first checks that the user is registered on the server, then it loads the list of documents belonging to that user. Finally, the list is returned to the client through the standard output. On error, the script returns an appropriate diagnostic.
Executing scripts on a remote server poses several problems concerning message security and authentication of users and applications. These security issues are not addressed here, but they are considered for a future version of Alliance.
In order to cope with the specific constraints of the Internet, each instance of Alliance is now divided into two processes (see Figure 4), the Editor and the Assistant:
Each user on a site is served by an Editor process and an Assistant process. In addition to these processes, which are in charge of the local users, each Alliance site runs a daemon, even if no local user is active. This daemon process is a HTTP server that contains the Alliance scripts implementing all operations required by the remote Alliance Assistants. Each Alliance script is executed in response to an Alliance client request.
Figure 4 - Architecture for a wide area network
The notion of a user is fundamental in a groupware application. Some applications rely on the notion defined by the host operating system. These users are considered as persons who can login to make actions with well specified privileges on computer resources (disks, CPU, files, display, applications, drivers, etc.). Such a user definition is not adapted to the shared environment of distributed groupware applications, as it does not consider remote users, nor the specific resources of the application.
In Alliance, a user is simply a name (called ``external name'' below) that identifies a person. A list of users is associated with each document. This list is built by the document owner and is independent of the lists associated with other documents. It indicates the users who are authorized to act on the document. The document owner can update this list at any time.
The document owner is the user who creates the document or makes it available in the Alliance environment. Initially, the owner plays the role of a manager for the whole document. He/she is free to assign various roles to other users.
A notion of group is also used in Alliance. A group is a name that represents several users playing the same role on documents. A user may be a member of several groups. A group can appear in the list associated with a document. It indicates that all users belonging to that group are allowed to act on the document.
All users of the list associated with a document can be involved in the commands for sharing documents. They will also be involved in future tools which are under development for negotiation, messaging or annotation. For instance, the document sharing tool used by managers allocates roles to the users and groups according to the list associated with the document.
An Alliance user must be registered in the host system of one site involved in the application. This site contains the information needed for managing all documents belonging to that user. As the scope of a user is restricted to the host system where it is registered, users have not only an external name, but also an internal name that contains both the identification of their site and their login name on that site. The user list associated with each document contains both the external name and the internal name for each user.
When the document owner creates or updates the list of users, he provides the following data for each entry:
Once the list has been initialized, the owner sends a message to all users concerned by the document and gives them his/her URL, his/her login name and the local document name. Each remote user can then get a full copy of this document, and know the associated users and groups. Thus, all users are able to contact each other, even if they meet for the first time.
In Alliance, a document is represented by a set of files which contain: document fragments, user roles for each fragment, the order of all fragments in the document, and the current state of each fragment.
In order to allow each user to work on a shared document, even in case of network failure, documents are copied on each site where they are needed. All document fragments and the corresponding management information are replicated among different sites (see Figure 5), where they are stored in local files. Each user can then work independently. In order to allow cooperation and group awareness, local copies must be updated when remote users have made modifications. But, as Alliance is based on an asynchronous model of cooperation, these updates do not need to be done in real time. Nevertheless, a mechanism is required for maintaining the consistency of all those copies.
Document consistency is based on a simple principle. In the whole system, there always exists one master copy for each fragment, which is the reference; there are as many slave copies as needed. On a given site where at least one user works on the document, all fragments of that document are available in local files and each fragment copy is either the master copy for that fragment or a slave copy. These two types of copies allow different effective roles to be played by a local user:
According to this principle, the set of all master copies constitutes the current document state. As a site usually does not own the master copies of all fragments of a given documents, each site, and then each user, may have a delayed perception of the document state. However, these different perceptions of the document are updated when a site owning the master copy of a fragment produces a new version of that fragment.
Figure 5 - Distribution of the fragment copies of a document
Master copies can migrate from one site to another. This operation is based on a transaction mechanism in order to avoid loss or duplication of the master copy that could be caused by communication failures. The possibility of moving the master copy of a fragment is evaluated each time a user tries to act on a fragment with the writer or manager role, in accordance with his potential role. The transaction fails if the master copy is unreachable or is already locked in reader or manager mode by its current owner. If no user is currently playing the writer or manager role on the site of the master copy, or if the user playing these roles accepts to change role, the master copy can move.
When a fragment is updated by a user acting as a writer, a copy of this fragment is not automatically sent to all sites working on the document. Only a short message is sent: it informs the remote sites that an updated version of the fragment is available. With the replication policy presented above, communication between sites is needed only to transmit these short messages, to transfer updated copies to the sites which ask for it, and to get remote user lists.
An advantage of document replication is that it allows disconnected cooperative work. We might think for instance of a user accessing the network and working in a collaborative way on a document. When he/she leaves his/her office, he/she disconnects his/her workstation and continues to work in disconnected mode, with the full editing environment. When the station is connected again to the network, Alliance automatically updates all document fragments. This kind of operation mode is the result of an intended disconnection. In case of any network failure, users can work on their documents in the same way. Obviously, disconnection should not last too long.
The current implementation of Alliance includes all functions presented in this paper. Additional services are under development for helping users to communicate with each other through an annotation mechanism and additional dialog options. Annotations will permit users to associate some comments with the document parts for which they have only the reader role. Private and shared annotations will be available.
The wide area version of Alliance uses only one part of the services provided by the Web, the HTTP protocol and servers. It does not take advantage of all the possibilities offered by the World Wide Web. For the moment, document fragments are stored in a specific format, not in HTML [4], which is the usual document format on the Web. The next version of Alliance will also integrate HTML. In fact this work is in progress. The Grif editor has already been adapted to the Web and the result of this adaptation, Symposia, obviously handles HTML documents [7]. Alliance and Symposia are converging in order to provide Web users with a collaborative tool for producing HTML documents on the Web.
1. T. Berners-Lee, Hypertext Transfer Protocol: A Stateless Search, Retrieve and Manipulation Protocol, Internet draft, CERN, November 1993.
2. T. Berners-Lee, Uniform Resource Locators - A unifying syntax for the expression of names and addresses of objects on the network, Internet draft, CERN, January 1994.
3. T. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, A. Luotonen, H. Frystyk Nielsen and A. Secret, ``The World Wide Web'', Communications of the ACM, vol. 37, num. 8, pp. 76-82, August 1994.
4. T. Berners-Lee, Hypertext Markup Language Specification - 2.0, Internet draft, CERN, November 1994.
5. V. Quint, I. Vatton, ``Grif: an Interactive System for Structured Document Manipulation'', Text Processing and Document Manipulation, Proceedings of the International Conference, J. C. van Vliet, ed., pp. 200-213, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
6. V. Quint, I. Vatton, ``Making Structured Documents Active'', Electronic Publishing--Origination, Dissemination and Design, vol. 7, num. 1, pp. 55-74, March 1994.
7. V. Quint, C. Roisin, I. Vatton, ``A structured authoring environment for the World Wide Web'', Proceedings of the Third International World Wide Conference, Computer Networks and ISDN systems, ed., pp. 831-840, The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking, vol. 27, April 1995.
Dominique Decouchant
CNRS-IMAG
email: Dominique.Decouchant@imag.fr
Vincent Quint
INRIA Rhône-Alpes
email: Vincent.Quint@inria.fr
Manuel Romero Salcedo
INRIA Rhône-Alpes / IMAG
email: Manuel.Romero@imag.fr