Developing middleware for Web-aware systems: lessons learned

The World Wide Web has transformed itself in the last few years from a simple state-less multimedia platform to a global distributed processing environment. As Web computing gains in popularity, different techniques emerge facilitating application sharing over the Internet. This paper discusses the design and development issues concerning middleware for Web-aware systems. GoWeb has been developed as a distributed infrastructure where Web-enabled applications can be embedded. It supports collaborative work with multimedia user interface. The experience gained through its design, implementation, testing and enhancements is discussed with a goal to share experience and provide rationale for development of cost-effective, efficient and media-rich Web-based applications.