Witan web and the software engineering of web-based applications.

WitanWeb is a web-based application that supports the interactions among program committee members, authors, and reviewers for the refereeing process of conferences. Since development began in 1997, it has evolved a great deal to support the requirements of CASCON, WWW8, and ICSE 2001 as well as several other significant conferences. The development focus has emphasized usability related to the task as well as security, integrity, and availability to encourage the development of trust by each class of users.The architecture and development process of WitanWeb is discussed as well as the experience gained about particular issues of software evolution as it relates to web-based systems. New insights on software engineering are provided by software engineering researchers forced to meet tight deadlines without compromizing the above goals or losing data through software or hardware failure.