Collaborative Web Page Browse with AJAX and Comet Proxy

Abstract

Collaboration is becoming more and more important than before. Many fields including education and business can benefit from the visual collaboration. We already have many picture media sharing applications on the web, but the most natural media format organizing the information is the web page, but till now, there is no a very well-known application offering pure web page sharing without installing any plug-in or client software. In the paper we proposed an collaborative web page browse application based on AJAX and Comet technology, human action is transported to a collaborative server by additional AJAX process, audience browser's reaction is done by Comet data receiving. By filtering the URL and JavaScript code in the original web page, the collaborative server can convert the ordinary single-user oriented web page into multi-user collaborative web page without changing the media type of content like pictures. We use browser event hooking to make the change of display or user action available for the collaborative server, overriding of the mouse right button behavior make the operation more feasible than dull screen grabbing. Now time we are implementing the prototype of the application on several open-source projects.