Software Infrastructure for Delivering and Supporting Distributed Applications Enhanced with Awareness

Last technological advances have brought drastic changes affecting the way distributed systems are conceived. Designers have to tackle the fact that applications could be controlled by different end users on diverse computing platforms in assorted environments. However, these kinds of facilities only make sense when they are ruled by the well-known group awareness. It is necessary to devise new mechanisms to support and automate the creation of distributed applications flexible enough to cope with the increasing diversity of contexts and able to deal with different group situations. In this paper we present how the guidelines and software support defined in the Dichotomic View of Plasticity can be applied to develop components for particular systems aimed at providing and maintaining group awareness. The aim is to promote distributed interaction and real time coordination among remote users, contributing to real collaboration and a deeper understanding in multi-environment groupware scenarios. This approach includes some innovations that make it different from conventional groupware design methods in some important aspects. A case study is presented in order to show how the approach works.