Coordinating distributed applets with Shade

As coordinated activities like electronic commerce and workflow systems are emerging as an important applications field of the Internet, it is necessary to invent and test new programming languages suitable to design these applications. Shade is a language for coordinating active pages including Java applets. Shade is based on a concept called the object space, that is used both as repository for objects and as coordination medium. The object space offers several services which can be exploited by Java objects. We describe the basic ideas in the language, its current implementation and programming environment, and two applications in the fields of electronic commerce and workflow applications.