Weaving a social fabric into existing software

Abstract

Contextual collaboration is a promising approach to embedding new collaborative features into existing applications. However, incorporating such new features may be too difficult for applications without extensible frameworks or too complex for legacy, custom, and mission-critical applications. We present Aspect-Oriented Retrofitting as a lightweight approach to embedding contextual collaboration in this class of applications, describe guidelines for designing retrofitting aspects, and walk through two examples. © 2005 ACM.