The domain of remote access and synchronous collaborative work (application sharing) has been closed for Java-based applications up until today. The main reason was lacking flexibility in security and GUI APIs currently implemented in JDK and JRE.

The upcoming version of JDK and some of already released additional APIs introduce finely grained security configurations and a new set of basic GUI components (Swings) thought to become "the next AWT".

Swings implements the Model-Component-View (MCV) architecture known from Smalltalk. The MCV implementation in Swing separates on-screen presentation of a GUI component from its data and event processing. As result the same GUI component can have different or even multiple views.

The talk will discuss the concept of the Component Model Reflector (CMR), which makes a local presentation of a Java GUI visible via a network. The main idea of CMR is to make a reflection of the logical GUI model accessible via the network and viewable for external network clients.

In addition to remote access and synchronous collaboration CMR is able to provide scalable services for thin and handheld devices as well as for GUI sharing with special security requirements.

The talk will also give a short overview of other works in the area of collaboration with Java-based applications.