Chimera: hypertext for heterogeneous software environments

Emerging software development environments are characterized by heterogeneity: they are composed of diverse object stores, user interfaces, and tools. This paper presents an approach for providing hypertext services in this heterogeneous setting. Central notions of the approach include the following. Anchors are established with respect to interactive views of objects, rather than the objects themselves. Composable, n-ary links can be established between anchors on different views of objects stored in distinct object bases. Viewers (and objects) may be implemented in different programming languages afforded by a client-server architecture. Multiple, concurrently active viewers enable multimedia hypertext services. The paper describes the approach and presents an architecture which supports it. Experience with the Chimera prototype and its relationship to other systems is described.