Building a distributed application using visual Obliq

Krishna Bharat, Marc H. Brown
1995 Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '95  
The charter of SRC is to advance both the state of knowledge and the state of the art in computer systems. From our establishment in 1984, we have performed basic and applied research to support Digital's business objectives. Our current work includes exploring distributed personal computing on multiple platforms, networking, programming technology, system modelling and management techniques, and selected applications. Our strategy is to test the technical and practical value of our ideas by
more » ... lding hardware and software prototypes and using them as daily tools. Interesting systems are too complex to be evaluated solely in the abstract; extended use allows us to investigate their properties in depth. This experience is useful in the short term in refining our designs, and invaluable in the long term in advancing our knowledge. Most of an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributors to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproducing, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to the Systems Research Center. All rights reserved. Abstract This report describes Visual Obliq, a user interface development environment for constructing distributed, multi-user applications. Applications are created by designing the interface with a GUI-builder and embedding callback code in an interpreted language, in much the same way as one would build a traditional (nondistributed, single-user) application with a modern user interface development environment. The resulting application can be run from within the GUI-builder for rapid turnaround or as a stand-alone executable. The Visual Obliq runtime provides abstractions and support for issues specific to distributed computing, such as replication, sharing, communication, and session management. We believe that the abstractions provided, the simplicity of the programming model, the rapid turnaround time, and the applicability to heterogeneous environments, make Visual Obliq a viable tool for authoring distributed applications and groupware.
doi:10.1145/223355.223757 dblp:conf/chi/BharatB95 fatcat:sjfjvo6jc5dazkfv62y24h4hva