Scalability and interoperability in service-centric architectures for the Web

The Internet provides a computing infrastructure that is highly distributed by nature. In the future the number of actively and cooperatively interacting parties on the Internet, such as traditional computers, embedded devices or various service providers in the field of electronic commerce, will increase further. In such an environment, traditional client/server architectures reach the limit of their capability. Decentralized, distributed software architectures which actively support the object and code migration paradigm, are more suitable. We present a sophisticated approach to a scalable and interoperable service architecture for the Web. We propose a loosely coupled network of service nodes which supports scalability, integration and management of heterogenous services in an uniform way. Our proposed service infrastructure provides a platform to easily locate, connect, integrate and use services of any type. It addresses issues of bandwidth, security, distribution and integration, which are particularly important within the Web, at a general framework level