Arcadia Announcement: Chimera v1.0 release

[dwig@xxxxxxxxx]

Here's an announcement of a hypermedia system that I got from another
mailing list; it raised some Xanadu-related questions in my mind:

- Where Chimera and Xanadu have similar functionality, how do they differ in
architecture?

- What, if any, is the intended relation between Xanadu and other related
systems and projects such as this one and the WWW?

- What are the essential features of Xanadu that are missing from existing
hypermedia systems?

Don Dwiggins			"Things should be made as simple as possible,
Mark V Systems, Inc.		   but no simpler"
dwig@xxxxxxxxx                       -- Albert Einstein


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Subject: Chimera announcement
From: Ken Anderson <kanderso@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                     Chimera
                          Heterogeneous Hypermedia System

                              Kenneth M. Anderson
                             E. James Whitehead, Jr.
                           Professor Richard N. Taylor

                                Arcadia Project
                                  U.C. Irvine

                               November 15, 1994
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNOUNCEMENT:

The Arcadia Project at the University of California, Irvine, announces
the release of version 1.0 of the heterogeneous hypermedia system, Chimera.

GENERAL OVERVIEW:

Chimera is an open, serverized, hypermedia system that supports n-ary
links between heterogeneous tools and applications in a network.
Objects manipulated by separate applications can be linked together
through Chimera.  From the user's standpoint, for example, while
working with one object in one application, an anchor on the displayed
object may be selected, causing another application to start up,
displaying a related (linked) object.  Chimera comes with bindings to C
and Ada;  bindings to several popular tools have been constructed.
Chimera makes no assumptions or demands regarding user interface system
employed or how or where objects are stored.

Chimera embodies the following technical attributes:

Heterogeneous object editor & viewer support: 

   Many different applications can be integrated with Chimera allowing 
   them to participate in a hyperweb.

Anchors specialized to particular views: 

   Chimera handles just the links between objects and not their display, thus
   the applications which display the objects can make the display of anchors
   customized to the views of the objects.

Multiple-view, concurrent, and active displays: 

   Chimera has a client-server architecture. The Chimera server handles
   connections from client applications and handles the routing of messages
   (e.g. link traversals) between them.

Links across heterogeneous object managers:

   Since an application manages the access and display of an object, and 
   since anchors are created with respect to an object's view and not 
   directly on an object, links between objects stored in different object 
   managers (or even a file system) are easily established.

n-ary links:

   A link is not restricted to a source and destination. Instead, links
   are modeled as a set. One anchor can take a user to multiple
   destinations in Chimera and all of them can be viewed at once (limited
   only by screen real estate).

Chimera comes with application programming interfaces (APIs) for clients
written in the Ada and C programming languages. In future releases
we plan to provide additional APIs for C++, SmallTalk, and tcl.

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:

   We built and tested Chimera on Sun hardware running SunOS 4.1.3.

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

   In order to compile the C API, you will need a C compiler such as gcc.
   The C API can be used along with the binary release of the server on 
   platforms that do not have a SunAda compiler.

   In order to compile the source release and/or the Ada API, you will need the 
   SunAda compiler version 1.1 or later.

   For the source release you will also need Q version 3.2, and Arpc version
   402.3. Q and Arpc are systems built by the Arcadia project at the 
   University of Colorado, Boulder. Instructions for obtaining these two 
   systems are included in the INSTALL file of the release.

   You will need the program gzip to uncompress the tar files described below.
   gzip can be obtained from any GNU software ftp site.

AVAILABILITY:

   Chimera is available via anonymous ftp:

   Host: liege.ics.uci.edu
   Directory: pub/arcadia/chimera

   Two files are available:

   chimera.1.0.tar.gz: A tar file compressed using gzip containing the full
                       source release of Chimera.

   chimera.1.0.bin.tar.gz: A tar file compressed using gzip containing a
                           binaries release of Chimera which includes the
                           source code for the two APIs and the 
                           chimera server/support tools executables.

   Obtain the former if you want access to all of Chimera's source code.
   Obtain the later if you are more interested in integrating clients
   with Chimera and don't really care how the Chimera server is implemented.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

   All feedback is welcome at chimera-local@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
   All bug reports are welcome at chimera-bugs@xxxxxxxxxxxx

   We shall attempt to contact you as quickly as possible in response to your
   mail.

WWW INFORMATION:

   The release and more information about Chimera and Arcadia in general
   is available on the World Wide Web.

   Information about:

   Arcadia in general: http://www.ics.uci.edu/Arcadia/
   Arcadia at UCI    : http://www.ics.uci.edu/Arcadia/atUCI.html
   Chimera           : http://www.ics.uci.edu/Arcadia/Chimera/chimera.html

Sincerely,

Kenneth M. Anderson
E. James Whitehead, Jr.
Professor Richard N. Taylor

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