XML in practice: the groupware case

The Internet has more and more evolved from an information pool used by individuals for information gathering towards a medium that is being used by groups for information sharing and exchange. Today´s Internet applications include local community networks as well as global business-to-business communication. The more the Internet is becoming a major part of our daily communication infrastructure, the more demands of effective tools for cooperation support arise. We have developed a Web-based groupware system-the BSCW shared workspace system-which aims to satisfy these demands. In this paper we describe a Java-based extension of the BSCW system that has been designed to improve usability of the system. As a consequence of limitations experienced from HTML-based user interfaces we have extended BSCW by a new JBrowser applet that uses XML as a data description language and provides a graphical representation of the user´s shared workspaces. It can be seen as an example of how XML and Java can leverage from each other, how XML structures can be incorporated as objects in traditional applications, and how XML can be used to build a communication bridge between object repositories