More and more people are using the Internet to send email, read news, establish and visit web sites. Virtual communities on the Internet bring people together to chat, share ideas and information. Business sectors use Internet chat room to conduct meetings while friends use ICQ to keep in contact. There is a need for a virtual community supporting various kind of communication such as 1-to-1 interaction and 1-to-N interaction. However, implementing a virtual community is a difficult task. Many issues must be addressed including the development in server-client architecture, communication protocol, application framework design, world information synchronization and layout management. Up until now, there is no simple solution to facilitate the creation of virtual community....[ Read more ]

More and more people are using the Internet to send email, read news, establish and visit web sites. Virtual communities on the Internet bring people together to chat, share ideas and information. Business sectors use Internet chat room to conduct meetings while friends use ICQ to keep in contact. There is a need for a virtual community supporting various kind of communication such as 1-to-1 interaction and 1-to-N interaction. However, implementing a virtual community is a difficult task. Many issues must be addressed including the development in server-client architecture, communication protocol, application framework design, world information synchronization and layout management. Up until now, there is no simple solution to facilitate the creation of virtual community.

This thesis presents a framework that supports the rapid development of application specific virtual meeting places. The framework provides general messaging functions and allows users to create environments that support a wide range of communication methods. This allows designers to build virtual communities rapidly.

To simplify navigation and enable re-use of code, we adopt a room-based approach to construct virtual meeting places. Rooms are application specific. By grouping rooms together, a virtual environment is created. Users can create rooms, join rooms, delete rooms, and query room status.

Implementing application specific room requires much effort. Development of the current virtual community system is time consuming and inflexible. Our framework allows users to create their own rooms. Under these circumstances, the development work partially shifts from the developers to the users, thus shortening the development time.

A compiler was created for generating ASVMP. When users enter a room, the room generator reads the room description file and creates the visual display and data representation dynamically.