Conclusions Table of Contents Related Work Acknowledgments 7. In conclusion, Chimera makes a variety of contributions to software engineering environments and to hypertext technology, including the simultaneous satisfaction of the requirements described in the introduction. The essence of the contributions are key concepts and separations of concerns, provision of an effective set of server capabilities, and the demonstrated ability to simultaneously satisfy a wide variety of objectives in a single system. The concepts and separations include view-specific anchors and separating object and anchor persistency from link persistency.
Viewers define anchors and a hypertext server has responsibility for management of the links.
Allowing viewers to define anchors permits a variety of types of anchors to be defined, and they may be implemented in non-invasive ways. The concepts are defined in a media-independent manner and such that scalability is supported. We have built a prototype system, Chimera, to validate both the concepts and architecture. In addition, we believe our approach has value outside of the SDE domain and can aid such tasks as ethnographic studies and the building of digital libraries. Some open, and potentially troublesome, issues with this approach exist.