Towards a Uniform Cooperative Platform: Cova Approach and Experience

A cooperative platform called Cova is presented, whichaims to uniformly model a wide range of cooperation scenarios and toreduce the groupware design and development work. To achieve thesegoals, Cova provides two facilities, namely a specification languagefor developers to describe various cooperation modes uniformly and arun-time system that provides some general-purposed servicesguaranteeing the semantics specified. With these facilities, thedevelopers can then concentrate on the application specific functionsrather than the control mechanisms. Therefore, the developmentefficiency is promoted. This paper details the design andimplementation issues of the platform including the model and thespecification language, platform architecture, transaction management,service integration and so on. Application development with Covaplatform is also covered.