Coordinating Collaborative Interactions in Web-based Mobile Applications

TL;DR: The Mingo framework is presented, which provides dedicated coordination programmer constructs for distributed event composition and group coordination by blending techniques common in complex event processing and group communication.

Abstract: Mobile applications for interactive surfaces that utilize the web as a platform now have the ability to provide richer interactions hitherto unrealized by running them on isolated devices. These modern applications can now support proximal and remote collaborative interactions for multiple clients simultaneously connected to each other. Most technologies however currently lack programming language abstractions for coordinating complex interactions, such as to define, detect and combine complex events coming from multiple clients or other software entities. Furthermore, they lack the expressiveness required to support non-trivial levels of collaborative interactions for connected clients. In this paper we identify two software mechanisms that web-based mobile applications should provide to support the development of collaborative interactions:~distributed event composition and group coordination. We present the Mingo framework, which provides dedicated coordination programmer constructs for these two mechanisms by blending techniques common in complex event processing and group communication. Consequently, we validate our framework by implementing a mobile drawing application with support for collaborative interactions and evaluate it by comparing it with a related implementation.