We present here the recent work at NPAC aimed at developing WebFlow - a
general purpose Web based visual interactive programming environment for
coarse grain distributed computing. We follow the 3-tier architecture
with the central control and integration WebVM layer in tier-2,
interacting with the visual graph editor applets in tier-1 (front-end)
and the legacy systems in tier-3. WebVM is given by a mesh of Java Web
servers such as Jeeves from JavaSoft or Jigsaw from MIT/W3C. All system
control structures are implemented as URL-addressable servlets which
enable Web browser-based authoring, monitoring, publication,
documentation and software distribution tools for distributed computing.
We view WebFlow/WEbVM as a promising programming paradigm and
coordination model for the exploding volume of Web/Java software, and we
illustrate it in a set of ongoing application development activities.