Towards a Survey of the Deployment Space for Internet Applications

Internet applications are deployed over increasingly complex collections of devices located in network topologies of increasing variety. We seek to develop a complete development environment in which such applications can be designed, implemented and deployed. A major part of this will be the ability to specify the deployment of an application -- i.e. after designing the application as a set of components supports a number of tasks; the designer should be able to state where each component will reside and which technology it will use. In order to achieve this, the environment must embody all the deployment options so that the designer can choose from them. This paper is a first attempt to categorise and itemise the options which will be available.