A multi-protocol framework for the development of collaborative virtual environments

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), are used for collaboration and interaction of possibly many participants that may be spread over large distances. Both commercial and freely available CVEs exist today. Currently, CVEs are used already in a variety of different fields: gaming, business, education, social communication and cooperative development. In this paper, a general framework is proposed for the development of cooperative environments which are able to exploit a multi protocol network infrastructure. The framework offers support to concerns such as communication security and inter-protocol interoperability and let software engineers to focus on the specific business of the CVE under development. To show the framework effectiveness we consider, as a case of study, the design of a reusable software layer, for the development of distributed card games, built on top of it. This layer is, in turn, used for the implementation of a specific card game.