CCF Collaborative Computing Frameworks Emory University Atlanta, GA, USA April 1998 Do you ever work with someone not in your office and wish that they could look over your shoulder? Then you might be interested in the alpha release of our collaboration environment. We are looking for alpha testers for our collaborative computing framework. CCF is an integrated environment supporting shared X applications, multi-party communication, data/file sharing and (coming soon) computation sharing. For more details, please visit our web page at: http://ccf.mathcs.emory.edu/ccf We really want to know what you think of this package. Do you think it might be useful to you? What did you like about the system? What did you not like? What worked or didn't work? Did you have any trouble compiling it? Did the supplied binaries run? Please let us know by sending mail to ccf@mathcs.emory.edu, or fill out a comment on the download page: http://ccf.mathcs.emory.edu/ccf/software.html. Thanks. Features of the alpha release: ------------------------------ * Remote users can share applications. All users will see the application window; input (keyboard,mouse) may be controlled by any one user at a time. * Shared virtual desktop. Shared X applications appear in a single virtual desktop which is WYSIWYS and has window manager functions. * Audio conferencing tool. Multiuser, multiway internet telephone. Several people can speak at once. Recording and playback available. * Text based chat for when bandwidth is limited or audio hardware is not available. * Annotations of windows. Any shared window can be drawn upon with "clearboard" tools. All users will see the markings. * Shared data space. Users can import (upload) files and any user can export (download). GUI based filespace manager (coming soon). * Shared computation space (coming soon). Users can share their CPU cycles with everyone in the group. * CCF supplies an underlying transport layer for doing reliable multicast independent of the MBONE. This library is suitable for other groupware applications. System requirements. This is the first release to run on Linux (2.0.xx and probably others, too). IRIX 6.2 and Sparc Solaris 5.5 and higher are supported as well. You must have working pthreads to use CCF. Our development and testing platforms use glibc, but earlier versions worked with libc5, as well. To retrieve the latest source distribution via anonymous ftp or the Web: ftp://ftp.mathcs.emory.edu/pub/ccf or http://ccf.mathcs.emory.edu/ccf/software.html CCF is distributed as a compressed (GZIP) tar file e.g. ccfalpha-src-980402.tar.gz that unpacks as a single source tree (./CCF) containing C and C++ source files and makefiles. The top-level Makefile creates architecture specific bin and lib subdirectories (e.g. bin/SunOS-5.6 and lib/IRIX-6.2). CCF currently supports three platforms: Linux-2.0, IRIX-6.2, and SunOS-5.5 and higher. The SunOS-5.6 version is the most thoroughly tested. Distributions containing only binaries are available as: ccfalpha-bin--.tar.gz You may wish to try installing the binaries before attempting a source build. Occasionally the binaries fail to execute properly due to version inconsistencies with dynamically linked libraries. Unpack the distribution using the GNU gtar utility: tar xzvf ccfalpha-src-980402.tar.gz or zcat ccfalpha-src-980402.tar.gz | tar xvf The latest source distribution file is about 1M compressed, unpacks to 4M and expands by about 15-50M depending on your achitecture. This can be trimmed in half by running "make clean" after building to remove .o files. The CCF Project at Emory University CCF is a software system that supports collaborative, distributed, computer-based problem solving in the natural sciences, business, government, and in educational environments. The goal is to evolve a virtual environment for distributed computation that supports integrated human AV communication, high performance heterogeneous computing and distributed data management facilities. CCF is a research project at Emory University involving the Math/Computer Science and Chemistry departments. Disclaimer: This is alpha release 0.99 of CCF -- Collaborative Computing Frameworks. This software is provided as is with no warranty expressed or implied. We hope you find it useful, but we won't be held responsible for any damage that may occur from reading, compiling, installing, using, or even thinking about it. License: CCF is Copyright (C) 1998 by Emory University except for the code in directories GSM, LPC, LPC10 in the CCFaudio directory and is distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Library General Public License (LPGL). The alpha version of CCF is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the license, or (at your option) any later version. Credits: CCF was created by Vaidy Sunderam, Injong Rhee, Alan Krantz, Shun Yan Cheung, Julie Sult, Soeren Olesen, Paul Gray, Phil Hutto, Sarah Chodrow, Michael Hirsch, Ted Goddard, Mic Grigni, N. Balaguru, Jim Nettles, Luigi Marzilli, Sue Onuschak, Scott Childs, Kevin Williams. The CCF project is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation under the multidisciplinary challenges initiative. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Michael D, Hirsch Work: (404) 727-4969 Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 FAX: (404) 727-5611 email: hirsch@mathcs.emory.edu http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~hirsch/ Public key for encrypted mail available upon request (or finger hirsch@cssun.mathcs.emory.edu).