After having some meetings about the future of my ...

After having some meetings about the future of my research in the ESW group (at INESC-ID), I've set a few goals to my PhD. I'm now a part of a project that will integrate a workflow management system into a Web Application development methodology. My contribution is centered on the following RIA features:

• Easy rich content development on a web application
• Disconnected browsing, used to enable specific parts of the workflow to be worked on without requiring a permanent Internet link.

The second point is my main goal, as the first is being more and more common every day (do a google search for 'AJAX' and check it out!). To achieve disconnected browsing, one of the biggest challanges is to find out what is going to be the persistency model - given that the information is always shared and interacted with between two possibly remote machines.

Some questions to be answered:

• What is the minimum ammount of information needed in the client for it to be able to execute operations offline?
• What are the security issued underlying such an information sharing?
• How can workflow activities be moduled so that they can be run isolated from the rest?