A REST protocol and composite format for interactive web documents

Abstract

Documents allow end-users to encapsulate information related to a collaborative business process into a package that can be saved, emailed, digitally signed, and used as the basis of interaction in an activity or an ad hoc workflow. While documents are used incidentally today in web applications, for example in HTML presentations of content stored otherwise in back-end systems, they are not yet the central artifact for developers of dynamic, data intensive web applications. This paper unifies the storage and management of the various artifacts of web applications into an Interactive Web Document (IWD). Data content, presentation, behavior, attachments, and digital signatures collected throughout the business process are unified into a single composite web resource. We describe a REST-based protocol for interacting with IWDs and a standards-based approach to packaging their multiple constituent artifacts into IWD archives based on the Open Document Format standard. Copyright 2009 ACM.