Large scale distributed cooperative environments on clouds and P2P

Abstract

The recent advances in networking have determined an increasing use of information technology to support distributed cooperative applications. Several novel applications have emerged in this area, like computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), large scale distributed virtual worlds, collaborative recommender systems, collaborative learning systems. The definition of these applications requires to afford several challenges, like the definition of user interfaces, of coordination protocols, and of proper middle-ware and architectures supporting distributed cooperation. Collaborative applications may greatly benefits also from the support of P2P and cloud architectures. As a matter of fact, with the emergence of readily available P2P and cloud platforms, collaborative applications developers have the opportunity of deploying their collaborative application by exploiting a hybrid P2P/Cloud architectures with a support dynamically adapting . This brings possibilities to smaller developers that were reserved for the big companies until recently. The integration of mobile/Cloud platforms for Collaborative Applications is another challenge for the widespread of these applications.