Collaborative web applications

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Over the last few years, the growth of the web has allowed more and more information to be posted online. In order to be kept up to date about their favorite sites, users may rely on event dissemination services. RSS is one of the most used protocols for that purpose. Event dissemination using RSS is based on a centralized model. Each user must have an application that periodically polls the information’s source, in order to be informed about updates. This kind of approach can be extended to allow collaboration between different subscribers of RSS feeds in the information propagation process. This allows for the dissemination process to be more efficient and, at the same time, allowing new and interesting features to be added. In this dissertion, we present a system that will allow RSS users to cooperate in feed disseminations,as well as collaborate in content rating and suggestion. The goal is to allow users to have faster and easier access to more relevant feeds sources. User interest in automatic content suggestions has grown in the last few years, leading to the creation of several sites providing that service. These services have a centralized architecture,where all users get their suggestions from a single server. A similar service can be deployed in a collaborative-based RSS feeds dissemination system. The system presented in this work lets users share information directly with each other, allowing the system to provide feeds suggestions.