The architecture described in this paper demonstrates the value of layering existing technologies. With very little effort, an application like the World-Wide Web benefits from distributed file system facilities for caching, replication, and security. We demonstrate that a distributed file system provides a solid base on which to build information services. Preliminary measurements based on file transfer performance and file access patterns indicate that file system access improves latency, and decreases server and network load. To provide further validation for this architecture, we are collecting performance data from the local deployment of our prototype translation library and repository server.
The architecture remains incomplete, however. A significant number of WWW transactions involve dynamically created documents---e.g. the result of a query or the output of a program---that do not fit the file system model. We believe that a facility for manipulating dynamic documents can be constructed by layering existing technologies. In this case, several existing systems provide efficient, secure remote procedure call services. We are exploring ways to layer WWW query resolution and dynamic documents on top of these services.