WWW R&D Information Warehouse

The proposed key innovation of this Phase I proposal is to combine the WWW with CORBA and OLE to create an Internet based workflow infrastructure that reuses legacy and COTS applications. The WWW and JAVA provide a means to create Internet based applications that users can run via WWW browsers. A developer can remotely develop a JAVA application and any user on the Internet can run it. CORBA and OLE provide a software bus for integrating COTS and legacy applications across all platforms as objects. This provides an assembly base for taking legacy and commercial software components and combining them. By merging WWW, JAVA, CORBA, and OLE an organization could integrate all of their legacy and commercial applications easily with the WWW, and make them available for use by anyone over the Internet. This would enable the development of such things as Internet workflow and remote collaboration as well as "off the shelf systems integration. This Phase I will demonstrate how US Navy personnel can collaborate with contractors over the Internet using commonplace WWW browsers and commercially available desktop tools. The approach will utilize innovative collaborative technologies such as the WWW, JAVA, OLE and CORBA along with easy to use COTS component software products called ComponentWare. This allows the US Navy to easily assemble Internet/WWW based collaboration systems using existing legacy and desktop applications. This "shrink wrapped" integration reduces and/or eliminates development and training times. Phase II will allow the development of production systems in weeks using these innovative OLE, CORBA and WWW based ComponentWare products.