The Collaborative Virtual Workspace

As I mentioned earlier, a Java source client also exists for CVW. This client uses the Java 2 port recently released by the Blackdown organization (http://www.blackdown.org/). Although this client does provide some newer and more advanced features and also works on Linux, it can be considered a beta-release and requires some bug fixes. We do believe, however, this client will eventually become the standard CVW client. We hope that many users will find it interesting and build it up to match the capabilities of the Tcl/Tk client.

Some investigation into replacing the document server has begun. Although the current server performs sufficiently, it has several drawbacks: the interactions between the client and server can't be made secure, the repository consists of one large directory, and no real authentication mechanisms exist. We hope to address these issues with a new document server that provides greater capabilities and performance.

Since CVW has been made into an open-source project, MITRE will be concentrating more on developing a next-generation collaboration system. We hope many people will find CVW as useful to them as it has been to us and continue to improve on it. Since it is a relative newborn as an Internet project, many development possibilities exist. We hope CVW will continue to expose many people to the possibilities of computer collaboration.