Refine
Year of publication
- 1999 (2)
Document Type
- Preprint (2)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Keywords
Faculty / Organisational entity
We have developed a middleware framework for workgroup environments that can support distributed software development and a variety of other application domains requiring document management and change management for distributed projects. The framework enables hypermedia-based integration of arbitrary legacy and new information resources available via a range of protocols, not necessarily known in advance to us as the general framework developers nor even to the environment instance designers. The repositories in which such information resides may be dispersed across the Internet and/or an organizational intranet. The framework also permits a range of client models for user and tool interaction, and applies an extensible suite of collaboration services, including but not limited to multi-participant workflow and coordination, to their information retrievals and updates. That is, the framework is interposed between clients, services and repositories - thus "middleware". We explain how our framework makes it easy to realize a comprehensive collection of workgroup and workflow features we culled from a requirements survey conducted by NASA.
Caching has long been used to reduce average access latency, from registers and memory pages cached by hardware, to the application level such as a web browser retaining retrieved documents. We focus here on the high-level caching of potentially shared networked documents and define two terms in relation to this type of caching: Zero latency refers to the condition where access to a document produces a cache hit on the local machine, that is, there is little or no latency due to the network (we assume that latency due to local disk and memory access is insignificant in comparison to network latency). A document with zero latency usually has been placed in the cache after a previous access, or has been pulled there through some prefetching mechanism. Negative latency refers to automatic presentation, or push, of a document to a user based on a prediction that the user will want that document. With an ideal system, a user would be presented with documents either that she was about to request, or that she would not know to request but that would be immediately useful to her.