OCE: An Online Colaborative Editor

Abstract

In this paper we present the development of an Online Collaborative Editor (OCE) software system. It allows several people, to edit and share computer files using different devices, such as mobiles, PDAs in an easy way. We use formal methods in order to automatize and describe OCE. Its formalism is very suitable to specify time requirements (both time consumption due to the performance of tasks and timeouts) as well as to represent data communication among different components of the system. This exercise convinced us that a formal approach to develop complex systems can facilitate some of the development phases. In particular, the testing and debugging phases, more precisely, how to chose those tests more suitable to be applied, is simplified since tests are automatically extracted from the specification.