Developing Web-aware systems

Developing Web-aware systems is one of the greatest challenges in the software industry today. Ideally, Web-aware systems should run on any machine connected to the Internet and should be accessed from any Web browser. However, this ideal cannot be achieved with present Web technology, characterised by static client-server models and stateless communication protocols. The paper describes the GoWeb system, an active framework for Web-aware applications that aims to overcome these difficulties. It is based on a thin-client/fat server principle and uses object-based distributed techniques and the Java programming language.