1996 Reports

An Architecture for WWW-based Hypercode Environments

Kaiser, Gail E.; Dossick, Stephen E.; Jiang, Wenyu; Yang, Jack Jingshuang

A hypercode software engineering environment represents all plausible multimedia artifacts concerned with software development and evolution that can be placed or generated on-line,from source code to formal documentation to digital library resources to informal email and chat transcripts. A hypercode environment supports both internal (hypertext) and external (link server) links among these artifacts, which can be added incrementally as useful connections are discovered; project-specific hypermedia search and browsing; automated construction of artifacts and hyperlinks according the software process; application of tools to the artifacts according to the process workflow; and collaborative work for geographically dispersed teams. We present a general architecture for what we call hypermedia subwebs, and groupspace services operating on shared subwebs, based on World Wide Web technology which could be applied over the Internet or within an intranet. We describe our realization in OzWeb.