Managing Distributed Workspaces with Active XML

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the distributed workspaces with active XML. The tremendous evolution of the Web has brought the need for platforms allowing to easily deploy distributed data management applications. The current trend goes towards the de-centralization of such platforms, and in particular to peer-to-peer architectures. The active XML system provides a peer-to-peer data integration platform, based on Web standards such as XML, and Web services. The system is centered on Active XML system (AXML) documents: XML documents where parts of the content are explicit XML data, whereas other parts are dynamically generated by calls to Web services on the same or on other peers. By including web service calls, AXML documents already have an inherent form of distributed computation.