| Summary: | Over the past few years, WWW has become the most successful information service on the Internet. This can be partially justified by the level of integration achieved by client software: an easy to use interface based on hyper-link navigation and a common naming convention (URLs) well supported by a multi-protocol machine (HTTP, FTP, etc). This out-of-the-box solution fulfils most of user needs, since the integration design process privileged the most commonly used set of services. A look backwards also brings up another example of success through integration: The BBS paradigm of communication. Traditional BBSs, successfully join small communities of users with common interests, offering them a way to share information, talk to each other (chat), send and receive private e-mail messages, and participate in open discussions using public messages. This paper shares the authors' recent experience in the design and development of communication environment with BBS-like functionalities, which is based upon WWW technology. Relevance is given to server side integration: a common set of data and configuration files, a set of administrative procedures and tools centred upon an HTTP server. Since many other types of on-line services may have similar requirements, in this paper the emphasis is on analyzing the imp1ementability of those communication models under WWW technology.
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