Groupware is difficult to develop and maintain because it involves multidisciplinary aspects in its construction. Besides the difficulties related to the development of collaborative applications, usually the developer must handle with other infrastructure aspects. In this dissertation, it is proposed a multilayer component based architecture with system infrastructure frameworks to deal with them. In the business layer, the Hibernate framework is responsible for the persistence of application data, and the Spring framework is responsible for, amongst others, transactions control and remote exposition of services. In the presentation layer the JaveServer Faces framework provides ways to create and to reuse user-interface components. This dissertation also presents a way to compare system infrastructure frameworks, considering both technical aspects, related to the application requirements fulfillment, and non- technical, related to aspects such as documentation availability and market acceptance. The architecture defined in this dissertation is applied to the AulaNet, which is a groupware for learning developed in the Software Engineering Laboratory of PUC-Rio.