Dynamic Content and Offline Collaboration in Synchronous Groupware

With the proliferation of mobile computing devices we witness an increasing demand for applications supporting collaboration for wireless mobile devices, where the possibility of temporary losing the connection is considerable. We present here a novel framework that allows users to work offline and then to merge the local data with the global application state when the connection is reestablished. The algorithm is optimal with respect to the amount of data sent through the network and is completely transparent to the user. We implemented two example applications, as Java applications on workstations and as Java spotlets on Palm Pilots, and used them to evaluate the system performance. The results show that that the system is scalable and has good performance.