An Architecture for Supporting "Pay-per-use" Downloadable Systems based on Java 2 and JavaSpaces

The widespread using of Internet creates new ways to distribute software. Currently, software companies are able to sell their software products to customers through direct downloading. This software distribution model can be extended to "rent" software services to customers and charge them based on their usage of the delivered services, but there have not been many researches done in this area. We have developed a web-based application called WebMetrics to experiment the possibility of developing a "pay-per-use" system. The experience of building the first version shows that a distributed computing platform is required to support the security and administration features, which are necessary in any "pay-per-use" systems. Through the investigation of available Java distributed computing platform, we selected a most suitable platform and refined the architecture to solve the difficulties faced in the first version of WebMetrics.