Collaboration and undo: the Web workspace paradigm

An informal look at some of the most annoying problems confronting users who attempt to manipulate data stored on the Web and a new update paradigm that handles many of these problems. This new approach, called Web workspaces, allows for collaboration, undo, ´what if´ analysis, auditing and a form of long running transaction. The new approach builds on workspace versioning techniques long in use in CASE and CAD systems and on transaction coordination techniques, long used to turn disparate applications into cohesive systems. The ideas can be applied to Web services or to enterprise frameworks to build more robust and usable applications for manipulating data on the Web.