Towards a richer Web object model

The World Wide Web is becoming an increasingly important factor in planning for enterprise distributed computing environments, both to support external access to enterprise systems and information (e.g., by customers, suppliers, and partners), and to support internal enterprise operations. Organizations perceive a number of advantages in using the Web in enterprise computing, a particular advantage being that it provides an information representation which• supports interlinking of all kinds of content• is easy for end-users to access• supports easy content creation using widely-available toolsHowever, as organizations have attempted to employ the Web in increasingly sophisticated applications, these applications have begun to overlap in complexity the sorts of distributed applications for which distributed object architectures such as OMG's CORBA, and its surrounding Object Management Architecture (OMA) [Sol95] were originally developed. Since the Web was not originally designed to support such applications, Web application development efforts increasingly run into limitations of the basic Web infrastructure.If the Web is to be used as the basis of complex enterprise applications, it must provide generic capabilities similar to those provided by the OMA (although these may need to be adapted to the more open, flexible nature of the Web, and specific requirements of Web applications). This involves such things as providing database-like services (such as enhanced query and transaction support) and their composition in the Web. However, the basic data structuring capabilities provided by the Web (its "object model") must also be addressed, since the ability to define and apply powerful generic services in the Web, and the ability to generally use the Web to support complex applications, depends crucially on the ability of the Web's underlying data structuring facilities to support these complex applications and services.