Jim has been performing research as a Ph.D. student in Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, as part of the Arcadia consortium. Jim's research lies in five areas:
The World Wide Web was originally conceived as an interactive, read/write medium, and it is only the early dominance of the Mosaic browser which cast the Web into its current publish/browse paradigm. While the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1) contains limited support for remote authoring in addition to remote browsing of content, this support is not sufficient for collaborative authoring of web content. Jim is the Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WEBDAV) Working Group, which is developing interoperability specifications for how to perform remote authoring and versioning of web content.
The distributed authoring and versioning working group has held many meetings. For a complete list of meetings, their minutes, and presentations given at the meetings, consult the WebDAV Home Page.
Requirements for a Distributed Authoring and Versioning Protocol for
the World Wide Web
Judith Slein, Fabio Vitali, E. James Whitehead, Jr., David Durand
Internet Informational Request for Comments 2291. February, 1998.
Collaborative Authoring on the Web: Introducing WebDAV
E. James Whitehead, Jr.
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 25,
No. 1, October/November, 1998, pages 25-29.
WebDAV: IETF Standard for Collaborative Authoring on the Web
E. James Whitehead, Jr., Meredith Wiggins
IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 2, No. 5, September/October, 1998, pages
pages 34-40.
World
Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WEBDAV): An
Introduction
E. James Whitehead, Jr.
ACM StandardView, Vol. 5, No. 1, March, 1997, pages 3-8.
Collaborative
Work: Distributed Authoring and Versioning
Gail Kaiser, Jim Whitehead
Column in IEEE Internet Computing, March/April, 1997, pages 76-77.
Software Engineering and the WWW: The Cobbler's Barefoot Children,
Revisited
Roy T. Fielding, E. James Whitehead, Jr., Kenneth M. Anderson,
Gregory A. Bolcer, Peyman Oreizy, Richard N. Taylor
UCI-ICS Technical Report 96-53, November 1, 1996.
Distributed Authoring on the World Wide
Web, Informal Working Group Meeting
E. James Whitehead, Jr.
World Wide Web Journal, Fall 1996, Vol. 1, No. 4, pages 75-77.
Requirements
on HTTP for Distributed Content Editing
E. James Whitehead, Jr.
Work-in-Progress, Internet-Draft draft-whitehead-http-distreq-00, reprinted
in the World Wide Web Journal, Fall 1996, Vol. 1, No. 4, pages 239-244.
Final
Report of the San Mateo Meeting of the Working Group on Distributed Authoring
on the World Wide Web
Edited by E. James Whitehead, Jr.
UCI-ICS Technical Report 96-32, August 9, 1996.
The promise that hypermedia technology holds for allowing software developers to capture the relationships between the software documents they produce (requirements, design, source code, test cases, etc.) and easily browse through their project information space will only be realized once hypermedia systems can support versioned links among versioned artifacts, which can be meaningfully grouped into configurations. Providing this support has been the goal of Jim's research into versioning and configuration management of hypermedia.
Jim was a participant in the first Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext Systems, held at ECHT'94 where he presented a proposal for adding versioning support to the Chimera open hypermedia system. He was also a member of the panel, "Things Change: Deal with It! Versioning, Cooperative Editing, and Hypertext," at Hypertext'96. Jim additionally discussed issues of hypertext versioning and configuration management as a participant at the Sixth International Workshop on Software Configuration Management, held before the 18th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE18), held March 25-26, 1996, in Berlin, Germany.
Versioning and configuration management are important issues for the World Wide Web. To ensure the future web provides good support in this area, in May, 1996, Jim gathered representatives from software configuration management firms, document management companies, WWW researchers, hypertext versioning researchers, and HTTP server authors together to form the Working Group on Versioning and Configuration Management of World Wide Web Content. This group was subsumed by the Working Group on Distributed Authoring and Versioning on the World Wide Web (webdav) in early September, 1996.
The topic of managing WWW content was the subject of a talk which Jim, along with Martin Cagan (then at Continuus Software, now at Netscape), gave at the symposium "Wired: The Internet and the World Wide Web" (May, 1996), sponsored by the Irvine Research Unit in Software (IRUS), titled WWW Content Management: Emerging Problems, Emerging Solutions. This talk was also presented at the Bay Area Roundtable (BART) in May, 1996.
A Proposal for Versioning Support for the Chimera System
E. James Whitehead, Jr., Kenneth M. Anderson, Richard N. Taylor
Proceedings
of the Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext Systems, held in connection
with ECHT'94, Edinburgh, Scotland, September, 1994, pages 45-54.
SCM and Hypertext Versioning:
A Compelling Duo
E. James Whitehead, Jr.
Position paper for Sixth International Workshop on Software Configuration
Management, held with ICSE18, Berlin, Germany, March, 1996.
Before focusing on the versioning aspects of open hypermedia, Jim worked with Ken Anderson and Prof. Dick Taylor on the Chimera open hypermedia system. Chimera provides hypermedia infrastructure for use within a software development environment. Due to its openness, Chimera can provide hypermedia functionality within existing tools such as vi, FrameMaker, an MPEG player, etc. Jim's research on the Chimera project has focused on these client application integrations with the Chimera system. As a thought experiment, Jim also considered an integration of Chimera with the WWW.
Control Choices and Network
Effects in Hypertext Systems
E. James Whitehead, Jr.
Proceedings of Hypertext'99, the 10th ACM Conference on Hypertext and
Hypermedia, pages 75-82.
A Critique of the Open Hypermedia Protocol
Kenneth M. Anderson, Richard N. Taylor, E. James Whitehead, Jr.
Journal of Digital Information, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1997.
Note: To access this article, you must perform a
free registration
first.
An Architectural Model for Application Integration in Open
Hypermedia Environments
E. James Whitehead, Jr.
Proceedings of Hypertext'97, the Eighth ACM Conference
on Hypermedia Technology, pages 1-12.
Interoperability
and Open Hypermedia Systems
Uffe Kock Wiil, E. James Whitehead, Jr.
In Proceedings of the
3rd Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems, held
with Hypertext'97, Southampton, UK, April 6-7, 1997.
Chimera:
Hypertext for Heterogeneous Software Environments
Kenneth M. Anderson, Richard N. Taylor, and E. James Whitehead, Jr.
In Proceedings of the 1994 European Conference on Hypermedia Technology,
ECHT'94, Edinburgh, Scotland, September, 1994, pages 94-107.
Fusing WWW and Link Server Technology: One Approach
E. James Whitehead, Jr., Roy T. Fielding, and Kenneth M. Anderson
In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems, Hypertext'96,
Washington, DC, March, 1996, pages 81-86.
Motivated by the vision of creating a marketplace of software components which could be quickly assembled into larger systems, Jim worked on the Chiron-2 software architectural style research project. As part of a team working on this project, Jim defined the aspects of an architecture which contribute to its ability to be a components marketplace, worked on an early version of the notation used to formally describe a Chiron-2 architecture, helped define the capabilities of the Chiron-2 design environment, worked on the Klax example, and provided in-depth critiques of important aspects of the Chiron-2 architectural style.
A Component
and Message-Based Architectural Style for GUI Software
Richard N. Taylor, Nenad Medvidovic, Kenneth M. Anderson, E. James Whitehead,
Jr., Jason E. Robbins, Kari A. Nies, Peyman Oreizy, and Deborah L. Dubrow
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 22, No. 6, June, 1996, pages
390-406.
A significantly extended version of the paper which appeared at ICSE17.
A Component-
and Message-Based Architectural Style for GUI Software
Richard N. Taylor, Nenad Medvidovic, Kenneth M. Anderson, E. James Whitehead,
Jr., and Jason E. Robbins
Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Software Engineering,
Seattle, WA, April, 1995, pages 295-304.
Software
Architecture: Foundation of a Software Component Marketplace
E. James Whitehead, Jr., Jason E. Robbins, Nenad Medvidovic, Richard N.
Taylor
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Architectures for Software
Systems, held in cooperation with ICSE-17, Seattle, WA, April, 1995, pages
276-282.
Formal
Modeling of Software Architectures at Multiple Levels of Abstraction
Nenad Medvidovic, Richard N. Taylor, E. James Whitehead, Jr.
Proceedings of the California
Software Symposium 1996, Los Angeles, CA, April, 1996, pages 16-27.
While Jim's work in hypermedia is directly applicable to software development environments, Jim has also performed some research on software development environments in general. In May, 1993, Jim participated in the Software Environments Technical Research Review, sponsored by the Irvine Research Unit in Software (IRUS), in which industry and academic representatives met to perform a research review on the topic of software environments. Jim helped write up a report on this meeting, and presented its results to the 4th Irvine Software Symposium.
Report on
The Software Environments Technical Research Review
Jeffrey J. Blevins, E. James Whitehead, Jr., Harry E. Yessayan
Proceedings of the 4th Irvine Software Symposium, April, 1994, pages 89-96.
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