Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

While the World-Wide-Web is demonstrably useful for a wide variety of tasks, in its current form it is not capable of supporting wide-area software development activities. This report describes the following areas for improvement and indicates key directions and approaches for their achievement:

• Support for first-class links, thereby enabling end-user annotation and evolutionary development of relationships within the environment;

• Support for a mechanism by which clients can receive asynchronous notifications of resource changes, which is necessary to support the complex interactions found in software engineering;

• Support for equal access to hypermedia services for client-side viewer applications, thereby facilitating the integration of non-HTML data formats found in software engineering;

• Support for distributed authoring and version control, which is necessary for developers to work within a shared information space;

• Support for flexible control and coordination mechanisms, enabling cooperative software development processes and workflow over the Web.