Managing Distributed Workspaces with Active XML

摘要

The tremendous evolution of the Web has brought the need for platforms allowing to easily deploy distributed data management applications. The current trend goes towards the de-centralization of such platforms, and in particular to peer-to-peer architectures. In this spirit, the Active XML system [1, 2, 3, 7] (AXML, for short) provides a peer-to-peer data integration platform, based on Web standards such as XML, and Web services. The system is centered around AXML documents: XML documents where parts of the content is explicit XML data, whereas other parts are dynamically generated by calls to Web services on the same or on other peers. By including Web service calls, AXML documents already have an inherent form of distributed computation. A higher level of distribution that also allows (fragments of) AXML documents and (some of the) Web services that they use to be distributed and/or replicated over several sites is highly desirable in today's Web architecture, and was addressed in [2]. The goal of this demo is to illustrate the power of this novel distribution and replication paradigm for easy scalable development of Web applications, via a particular example - the management of a collaborative workspace. To explain this, we now describe in more details what AXML is, the new issues brought by the distribution and replication of AXML documents and services, and why this novel paradigm is particularly attractive as a foundation for the distributed management of collaborative workspaces.