Three Issues in the Use of Versioned Hypermedia for Software Development Systems

The Software Concordance project is extending the concept of literate programming with research on how modern document and hypermedia services can improve software development environments. The Software Concordance editor is both a syntax-recognizing Java program editor and an XML document editor. It has a uniform document model, based on XML, that lets Java source code documents include both hyperlinks and inline multimedia documentation. The next step for the Software Concordance project is to enhance the editor with versioned hypermedia services in order to support sophisticated analysis and visualization of relationships among software documents. This article discusses three important issues for versioned hypermedia in this context: identification of the versioning infrastructure that will be required; exploration of how versioning information can be used to detect non-conforming documents; and the extension of versioned hypermedia to handle software configuration management.