ServiceGlobe: Distributing E-Services Across the Internet

The next generation of Internet applications is emerging: e-services. By an e-service, we understand an autonomous software component that is uniquely identified by an URI and that can be accessed by using standard Internet protocols like XML, SOAP, or HTTP. An e-service may combine several applications that a user needs, such as the different pieces of a supplychain architecture. For the end-user, however, the entire infrastructure will appear as a single application. The ServiceGlobe system provides a platform on which e-services (also called services or Web services) can be implemented, stored, published, discovered, deployed, and dynamically invoked at arbitrary Internet servers participating in the ServiceGlobe federation. While current approaches mainly try to integrate existing services which are already running on dedicated servers, we provide the functionality to specify new, composite services which can be deployed dynamically on arbitrary ServiceGlobe enabled servers/devices. Besides the support of standard functionality of a service platform like SOAP/XML communication, a transaction system, or a security system, the ServiceGlobe platform addresses also various optimization issues like load balancing or network oriented deployment during service execution. Due to its potential of changing the Internet to a platform of application collaboration and integration, e-service technology gains more and more attention in research and industry; initiatives like HP Web Services Platform [WSP], Sun ONE [Sun], or Microsoft .NET [NET] show this development. Although