Today a standard web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer comes with a complete environment for interacting and manipulating documents in HTML format. This positive development has made it possible for us to create Zezame, a web server application which has a Javascript client application running within the web browser. With the Zezame system, there's no need for you or your system administrator to download and install software on every users system.

So how does it work?

The central concept behind Zezame is that users should be able to collaborate on web documents without having to acquire permissions or rights at the web document source location. As long as a user has access rights to a web page, they should be able to annotate and collaborate around that page. The user's notes and a cached version of the annotated web document are stored on the Zezame server.

A simple scenario for sharing a page and putting notes on it for other Zezame users to see is:

1. A user retrieves a page from a web server.
    
2. The user decides he would like to share this document together with some notes with other Zezame users. The user can do this by clicking on the Open Zezame button in the browser (a favorite/bookmark which contains one line of Javascript) for the document to be made available via the Zezame system.
   
 
3. The browser requests the page from the Zezame server. The user is presented with an authentication dialog from the Zezame server. The user logs into the system.
   
 
4. The Zezame server retrieves the requested page from the web server, rewriting the page on the fly to allow for the Zezame infrastructure to support any notes which the user would like to add. It also rewrites any URLs in the page so they may pass through the Zezame server, adds hooks for the Javascript client, and then sends the Zezamized page on to the user's browser.
   
 
5. The user views the page, which looks exactly as it would do outside the Zezame environment. The user can now save the page into shared project folders and add notes to the page for other users to see and comment on.

Zezame server / client relationship

The Zezame Javascript client runs in the browser. The client runtime code is dynamically integrated with any HTML page that have been retrieved via the Zezame server. The client adds the user interface and event handler which make possible the display and manipulation of notes on HTML pages. Each page becomes integrated with the Zezame server which retrieved it.