Prototyping a Collaborative CAD System by Taking Advantage of Software Reuse and a Software Bus Framework

BART, a software bus, was designed to provide flexibility in the development of software systems by promoting component independence. This framework allows components to be constructed independent of the context in which they are to be used, thereby allowing them to be reused in many different situations. Our experience using BART to prototype a system that supports group collaboration between people residing in geographically different places demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. We were able to connect a number of existing components with little effort in a surprisingly short time. In this paper, we discuss the role BART played in supporting the integration of software components and in enabling us to rapidly prototype a shared-space collaboration system.