Table of Contents

About PeerView

PeerView is a software tool written in Java. Its purpose is to demonstrate the feasibility of an experimental approach to CSCW and groupware design which is formulated in (1). PeerView should therefore be seen as a prototype, at least in its present incarnation, as it lacks some of the industrial strength features expected from a commercial application. That is not to say it is toy software, or that it lacks ambition to become something more, so if you feel like contributing in some way or other to the future development of PeerView, please feel free to make contact at larsyde@diku.dk

Design and implementation

PeerView is based on two core ideas: artifact rendering and group review. The former refers to the use of visualization and other forms of rendering to present a complete and intuitively accessible representation of a set of artifacts such as code files or bitmap images. The latter is the term used for the exchanges among group members who have access to the rendered artifacts and are provided with facilities for discussion and communication.

PeerView is a prototype for these ideas. It uses a scalable, customizable panorama as its rendering mechanism and a USENET-like discussion forum as its group review medium. The user can place a set of documents onto the panorama, join one of several, user-defined groups, and have the documents distributed to the other group members. Each user can then navigate his or her panorama to get an overview of the work being done by the group as a whole and can contribute to ongoing discussions of the individual documents. All documents are kept updated at user definable intervals so as to give an accurate and concurrent representation of the group's work.

PeerView is written in Java (JDK 1.2.2), and uses the following technologies:

Status

Download

NOTE:The MacOS version is temporarily unavailable due to problems using the Swing classes with MRJ. If you have a Mac system that does support Java 2 and includes the Swing libraries, you should be able to use any of the other versions available from the below download pages.
Binaries
Client : Release #1.0
Server : Release #1.0
Source
The source code and preliminary documentation is available. Although version 1.0 is believed to be stable, bugs may persist. If you discover any, please report to larsyde@diku.dk.
Documentation
Available from the PeerView client in JavaHelp format or as a separate download in WinHelp format

Links

Literature

  1. Lars Yde & Jyrki Katajainen. Supporting Intellectual Work through Artifact Rendering and Group Review. DIKU Report 2000-11, Department of Computing, University of Copenhagen (2000)