Working group report on environments [program environments]

Abstract

The group agreed that stand alone programs are "dead", i.e., that modern programs should be expected to share data and functionality with other programs. Further, the "water level" for the amount of program interaction is rising as new environments become more sophisticated. The functionality that applications must share is increasing from sharing files, to object-based interaction, and beyond. Because of the rapid evolution of technologies for location-independent access, information exchange, and coordination, the group developed recommendations for funding sources, standards bodies, and environment and application developers. One general recommendation is that the subjects discussed by the group merit further study. Research, news groups, and conference discussions of standards/environment evolution were proposed. Funding sources are urged to adopt the standards model described here, promote multiple implementations early on, and then encourage coalescence of common features. Standards bodies are urged to consider the standardization of features that are already coalescing rather than to develop top-down standardizations far before the underlying processes are understood. Incremental, extensible standards are preferable to monolithic ones.