A framework for facilitating collaborative interaction between users of a web application is presented. The framework provides persistence and sharing mechanisms for arbitrary application-defined objects. The sharing mechanism is coupled with a consistency mechanism that keeps client states consistent even when users perform conflicting operations. This framework is application-independent in that the persistence, sharing between clients and maintaining a consistent state among the clients is accomplished without the need for specific knowledge of the design of the web application. Thus, web developers can focus on the logic of the application and the UI, instead of spending time designing and implementing collaborative capabilities.