The Artefact framework is a tool for building collaborative applications that deliver = representations of art objectoriented appXcation space to standard browsers.We present some aspects of Artefact's implementation, including_ enhancements to support synchronous collaboration, the de-coup~ng of input and output in the interaction protocol, a lighhveight gened-purpose Java appleqand tie Wera~en~ that bridge the gap behveen a browser and an appficahon.We describe some of the characteristics that m&e it easy to create multi-user applications witi ArtefacL and illustrate WISwith a simple example application.Finally, we compare Artefact to some existing distributed application platforms.