All of the code in the toolset is in service of the web-calculus. The web-calculus is a model explaining how capability-based security is applied to the WWW to create a platform for secure distributed services. Read the documentation linked from the web-calculus home page to learn more about this model.

The Waterken^TM Server is the top level application in the toolset. This HTTP server understands the web-calculus and how to translate requests into invocations on your application objects, implemented in the Java language. The server implements this translation using Java introspection, to minimize linking from your application objects to the server implementation. In a typical application, your source code will only import the org.waterken.db package, to interface with the server's object persistence engine. This object database code is a self-contained component of the toolset, which may be useful in other applications.

The code to translate between a web-calculus representation of data and a Java object representation is also a reuseable component of the toolset. This code provides an extensible framework for implementing bidirectional Java object to XML translations. More documentation is provided on the messaging home page.

The messaging framework is implemented in terms of a general purpose document model. This document model provides the coordination point for implementing interoperation between systems that use different syntax. For example, interoperation between the Waterken^TM Server and generic web browsers is implemented through a mapping of the document model to the application/x-www-form-urlencoded syntax native to web browsers. This toolset component may be useful in any application that needs to exchange data with diverse systems.

A capability URL provides stronger authentication guarantees than a typical URL. The YURL home page explains the nature and merits of these authentication properties. The URL component of the toolset provides an implementation of these semantics that conforms to the java.net.URL interface.

The web-calculus enables a field of new and interesting WWW applications. The IOU smart contract interface is a good example of the kind of new and exciting application that can be built using the Waterken^TM toolset.