SAGA: A web services architecture for groupware applications

To improve their efficiency and competitiveness, organizations are increasingly interested in applications that support team work, usually know as groupware. Beside interoperability, familiarity with the application and users' mobility support, a feature that is of outmost importance in groupware is the notification of events produced by cooperative activities. Web Services have emerged recently to support the exchange of data in distributed environments using common Internet technologies and have been used mainly to build business-to-business applications. However, Web Services have capabilities that make them suitable to meet the requirements posed by groupware applications, a field where little work has been carried out. This article describes a model for developing cooperative applications based on Web Services technology and using asynchronous notification of events, and presents a brief description of the implementation of the support services for that model and of a prototype application that uses them.