Framework for Collaborative Web Applications

Traditionally organisations have been collaborating to complement one another's capacity and capability. The nature of these collaborations has been long-term, taking a long time to establish, and leading to fairly rigid IT infrastructure to support these. Now organisations are beginning to collaborate on specific short-term projects, established in a short time and are highly volatile driven by varying degrees of trust and need. A new IT framework for collaborative web applications is needed to support this type of dynamic, short term, opt-in and opt-out approach to collaboration. Building on our previous work on a peer to peer architecture for Dynamic eCollaboration, we propose a framework that allows web applications to be exposed to business partners by enabling selective information and business logic sharing. This information sharing is end-user driven, easy to perform and secure. We believe this framework effectively addresses the needs of Dynamic eCollaboration bringing us closer to realizing its full potential.