A Light Weight Name Service and its use within a Collaborative Editor

\begin{abstract} This paper presents the LWNS a light weight name service specially designed for groupware applications and an example of its use. The chosen application, called {\sc Duplex}, is a collaborative editing environment for users connected through the Internet. It proposes a model based on splitting the document into independent parts, maintained individually and replicated within a distributed kernel. Naming is an important aspect of such application since objects (document parts) are replicated and distributed over the large heterogeneous network. However, this set is small (typically a few dozen elements) and composed of objects whose names are contextual to the document. Replicas are however maintained in heterogeneous file systems with no global naming scheme consistent with the name space of the collaboration. This requires a dedicated name service specially designed to solve this problem in large scale distributed applications. \end{abstract}