DistView is a prototype multicast middleware service for building collaborative applications. Written entirely in the Java programming language, DistView provides group communication services that meet the various shared state management needs of collaborative environments. It provides a rich interface for group and session management, the ability to ensure totally ordered message delivery, a lock-based distributed synchronization mechanism, and support for selective window sharing.
DistView is also used as data dissemination service, with delivery semantics ranging from a push-based scheme, where the communication system distributes large amounts of data of various types, obtained from different publishers, to the existing subscribers, to a pull-based approach where clients connect occasionally and transfer in asynchronous mode data previously existing in the system.