Unifying structure, behavior, and data with themis types and templates

  • Authors:

  • William Van Lepthien;Kenneth M. Anderson

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Colorado, Boulder, CO;University of Colorado, Boulder, CO

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Structural computing evolved from work on open hypermedia to aid in the creation of software infrastructure. Open hypermedia had produced software that provided applications with access to hypermedia structures and services. The question was asked if these results could be generalized to create similar tools for other domains. Initial work focused on the development of structure servers that can create and manipulate domain-specific structures, but little work focused on allowing those structures to provide a rich set of behaviors. Indeed, this forced developers to place behaviors on the client rather than having behaviors live within a structure server. This paper presents research on the addition of a type system to the Themis structure server and how these types interact with Themis's template mechanism to provide a single interface that unifies structure, behavior, and data. This new mechanism lets behaviors live within a structure server allowing them to be shared by client applications. To demonstrate its power, Themis is being used to re-implement the Chimera open hypermedia system.