No single platform is ideal for every application domain, and Egret is no exception. Egret's design is oriented toward application domains which require the collection, manipulation, and propogation of information about the state of collaboration. For example, information concerning what the member is working on, viewing, editing, or responsible for now or in the future. Members of the group require information about the history of other group members' collaborative activities. For example, information concerning what another member worked on recently, or the recent sequence of actions of another member, or the entire history of another member's group activities.
Members require information about the process of collaboration.
Investigating the storage, representation, and retrieval mechanisms required for collaborative state information has been a theme underlying all of our application experiences with Egret. CSRS goes one step further, by providing a process and data modelling language with which one can implement a broad spectrum of collaborative methods for software review and inspection. Egret and the World Wide Web Egret's emphasis on collaborative state information is but one of many interesting architectural contrasts between it and the World Wide Web. The http protocol implemented by the WWW is intrinsically stateless, which impedes the development of sophisticated models of users and collaborative processes that is the focus of Egret systems. Egret should be seen as an alternative, complementary paradigm to the Web.