Dynamic web server construction on the intranet using a change management framework

Abstract

As organizations increasingly emphasize effective collaborative working through networked systems, the World Wide Web (WWW) server and associated intranet technologies are gaining wider acceptance as a new enterprisewide information systems paradigm. In an intranet collaborative working environment, data used in the web server are usually modified more frequently than are those used in a traditional Internet web server. Thus, to support synchronous collaboration without causing any inconsistency among multiple concurrent users, the intranet web server must provide users with synchronized and consistent views of shared data. However, current web technologies have limitations in supporting this, largely because the existing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is unidirectional and does not allow web servers to send messages to their web browsers without first receiving requests from them. This paper proposes a web-based change management framework that can overcome such limitations and support synchronous collaboration in an intranet computing environment. The web-based change management framework facilitates management of dependency relationships between shared data in the web server and dependent user views in the client web browser and allows the web server to actively propagate changing details of the shared objects to all users referencing them. On the basis of the change management framework, we propose a dynamic web server that can support synchronous collaboration in various intranet-based collaborative systems including concurrent engineering design systems and electronic approval systems. The prototype system of the dynamic web server is developed on a commercial Object-oriented Database Management System (ODBMS) called OBJECTSTORE using the C++ programming language. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.