Interactive Web Documents: A composite format, REST protocol, and interaction controllers

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 for 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, presentation, behavior, attachments, and digital signatures collected throughout the business process are unified into a single composite web resource. We describe a standards-based approach to packaging multiple resources into IWD archives based on the Open Document Format, a REST-based protocol for interacting with IWDs, and an extensible interaction controller architecture. © Springer-Verlag 2010.