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Life Cycle Global HyperText offers easier information access to all members of a software development project, with all documents resulting from the software life cycle being available through WWW hypertext. These documents are connected, via hypertext links, to the documents produced in other stages of the life cycle. To experiment with this concept we have developed converters that transform several kind of documents into the WWW format. Up to now we have focused on source code, but we are now concentrating on documents produced in earlier stages of the software life cycle, such as requirements specification, analysis and design.

Software documentation for the user often exists in several forms including paper, electronic, on-line help, etc. We have build a system to help with the writing and maintenance of such kinds of documentation which relies on the FrameMaker product. As an example, we show how it is used to maintain the ADAMO documentation, delivered in 4 incarnations on paper, WWW hypertext, KUIP and running examples. The use of the system results in both time saving and quality improvements.

A commercial application of the World-Wide Web concepts is described. It is shown how it is possible to solve a real customer problem in a rapid and cost-effective way by means of the WWW framework. The application has been developed at the Library Center of the University of Bologna (CIB).

In this document, an approach to the development of WWW-accessible astronomical archives and databases is described, which can easily be extended also to other disciplines. The architecture is based on a set of servers running at the archive site, each performing a specialized task: accessing an SQL-based DBMS, retrieving and downlinking 1-D or 2-D data (measurements), displaying quicklook data, or plotting the results of a query to the database. All of the information on the user interface is dynamically stored in the database, allowing the pages to be prepared on-the-fly; no additional software needs to be run on the user’s computer. A WWW-accessible test astronomical archive, containing both 2-D (images) and 1-D (spectra) data, and having NCSA/Mosaic as an interface is described as an example of successful application of the above concepts.