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Distributed Authoring on the Web with the bscw shared Workspace system
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| bet | 3/9 | | Sana | 22.07.2021 | | Hajmi | 34.45 Kb. | | #15603 |
The BSCW system is based on the notion of a Ôshared workspaceÕ which the members of a group establish for organizing and coordinating their work. A shared workspace as realized by BSCW is a repository for shared information, accessible to group members using a simple user name and password scheme. A BSCW server (a Web server extended with the BSCW system through the CGI programming interface) manages a number of such workspaces for different groups and users may be members of several workspaces (e.g. one workspace corresponding to each project a user is involved with).
A workspace can contain information such as documents, images, links to other Web pages or FTP sites, threaded discussions, member contact information and more. The contents of a workspace are represented as information objects arranged in a folder hierarchy. Members can transfer (upload) information from their machines to a workspace and set access rights to control the visibility of this information and the operations which can be performed by others. Members can download, modify and request more details on the information objects by clicking on HTML links to request workspace operations from the BSCW server. After each operation the server returns a new HTML page showing the new state of the workspace (Figure 1).
Access to workspace functions is provided by the buttons at the very top of the page as well as the text HTML anchors below each object. The former operate on the current folder being shown, so that Ôadd URLÕ will return a HTML form for specifying the name and URL of a URL link object to be added to the current folder, while the latter perform operations on the individual objects, such as ÔrenameÕ, Ôedit descriptionÕ and so on. As a short-cut, the check-boxes to the left of each object in combination with the buttons above or below the list of objects allow operations on multiple object selections.
Clicking on an object name will perform different operations depending on the type of the object; clicking on a document will download it, possibly for display by the browser (for HTML files or GIF images for example), display by an external application (as with a Microsoft Word document) or saving to disk, while clicking on a folder ÔopensÕ the folder and replaces the current view with a display of the folder contents. This last method of navigating ÔdownÕ through a folder hierarchy is supplemented by a navigation bar at the top of the page presenting the current location and path; clicking on the first element of the path (":Horstmann" in Figure 1) returns to the current userÕs Ôhome folderÕ, which lists all the workspaces of which the user is a member, and therefore has access to.
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