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We describe a new type of collaborative system that exhibits
much of the simple, cooperative nature of a wiki, but allows dynamic
sharing of functionality as well as of content. In contrast with traditional
wikis, pages in this system are executable, and interoperate with
each other by passing and returning data structures of known type, such
as messages, URLs, or locations. This collaborative programming environment
is well suited to retrieving and combining content available on
the Web. Since code within pages can access any type of Web content,
the environment provides a collaborative way to convert diverse, unstructured
information into semantically annotated content that can be
combined into new and useful services. We discuss how these ideas have
been applied in WubHub, a prototype Web portal with a command-line
interface.
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