In 1994, hypertext researchers combined OpenHypertext technology with Software Development Environments (SDEs). The result was Chimera. Chimera allows developers to interconnect different software objects in a hypertext network, regardless of the object types.

Heterogeneity was a major concern for the Chimera team, since SDEs contain a wide variety of development and management tools. SDE viewers often support multiple views of the same objects. Therefore Chimera allows anchors to be created that are specialised to particular views (rather than objects). N-ary links can be created across heterogeneous object managers.

Chimera was based on a client-server model, where individual client components communicated using a remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism. The server maintained and stored the hyperweb, and served this structure to the clients for presentation to users.

Chimera demonstrated a useful application of hypertext to a real-world software engineering problem. Chimera also identified the problems of integrating with existing management systems, and providing a consistent interface over heterogeneous viewers.

Chimera

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