E. James Whitehead Jr’s research while affiliated with University of California, Irvine and other places

Emerging software development environments are characterized by heterogeneity: they are composed of diverse object stores, user interfaces, and tools. This paper presents an approach for providing hypermedia services in this heterogeneous setting. Central notions of the approach include the following: anchors are established with respect to interactive views of objects, rather than the objects themselves; composable, n-ary links can be established between anchors on different views of objects which may be stored in distinct object bases; viewers may be implemented in different programming languages; and, hypermedia services are provided to multiple, concurrently active, viewers. The paper describes the approach, supporting architecture, and lessons learned. Related work in the areas of supporting heterogeneity and hypermedia data modeling is discussed. The system has been employed in a variety of contexts including research, development, and education.

The World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) working group is extending HTTP1.1 to provide a standards-based infrastructure for asynchronous collaborative authoring on the Web. The WebDAV extensions support the use of HTTP for the interoperable publishing of a variety of content, providing a common interface to many types of repositories and making the Web analogous to a large-grain, network-accessible file system. By supporting mechanisms for both shared and exclusive write locking, WebDAV can accommodate a wide range of collaborations.

The World-Wide Web connects islands of information, along with the people seeking that information, from within corporate intranets and across the global Internet, easily and effectively. Sharing information without regard to physical location has prompted new forms of virtual business and social endeavors. A virtual enterprise is an organization unconstrained by geographic location, and a membership intersecting multiple traditional organizations. Virtual enterprises can be formed within large corporations (consisting of groups at distributed sites), as parts of business alliances or task forces [4], and even among individuals working independently of any corporate connection. Indeed, all that is needed to form a virtual enterprise is at least one common goal, a shared information space, a means of coordinating users’ efforts, and people willing to share the work.

This paper provides an architectural framework for modeling third-party application integrations with open hypermedia systems, which collects and extends the integration experience of the open hypermedia community. The framework is used to characterize applications prior to integration, and describe the qualities of a complete integration. Elements of the architectural model are artists, which are used to manipulate anchors, links, and native application objects; communicators, which manage information flow to and from the open hypermedia system; and containers which group the other elements. Prior integration experience is collected in a standard way using the model. Guidance in selecting the final integration architecture is provided by this prior integration experience, in conjunction with the degree of difficulty of an integration, which is related to the integration architecture.

The Open Hypermedia Protocol is a proposed standard for enabling the interoperability of client applications with open hypermedia systems. This paper presents the protocol at a high-level of detail, performs an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, and makes specific recommendations for improvements

While a large fraction of application code is devoted to graphical user interface (GUI) functions, support for reuse in this domain has largely been confined to the creation of GUI toolkits (“widgets”). We present a novel architectural style directed at supporting larger grain reuse and flexible system composition. Moreover, the style supports design of distributed, concurrent applications. Asynchronous notification messages and asynchronous request messages are the sole basis for intercomponent communication. A key aspect of the style is that components are not built with any dependencies on what typically would be considered lower-level components, such as user interface toolkits. Indeed, all components are oblivious to the existence of any components to which notification messages are sent. While our focus has been on applications involving graphical user interfaces, the style has the potential for broader applicability. Several trial applications using the style are described

While a large fraction of application system code is devoted to user interface (UI) functions, support for reuse in this domain has largely been confined to creation of UI toolkits ("widgets"). We present a novel architectural style directed at supporting larger grain reuse andjexible system composition. Moreover, the style supports design of distributed, concurrent, applications. A key aspect of the style is that components are not built with any dependencies on what typically would be considered lower-level components, such as user interface toolkits. Indeed, all components are oblivious to the existence of any components to which notification messages are sent. Asynchronous notification messages and asynchronous request messages are the sole basis for inter-component communication. While our focus has been on applications involving graphical user interfaces, the style has the potential for broader applicability. Several trial applications using the style are described.