Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

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 hypertext services in this heterogenous setting. Central notions of the approach include the following. Anchors are established with respect to interactive views of objects, rather than as attributes of objects. Composable, n-ary links can be established between anchors maintained by different viewers for objects stored in distinct object bases. Viewers (and objects) may be implemented in different programming languages, as a client-server architecture can be used to support the approach. Multiple, concurrently active viewers can be utilized. The paper describes the approach and considers how interfaces to these hypertext services can be supported. Experience with a prototype implementation is described.