Towards an extensible weblab architecture

Remote Laboratories have traditionally been focused on specific solutions for specific problems. We can find a wide range of Remote Laboratories in the literature, assisting different types of subjects but commonly bound to a restricted set of requirements. Due to this, little attention has been paid on working on a maintainable, scalable, secure architecture that addresses the requirements of a wider set of experiments, and that could be open enough to support or adopt new experiments, developed using different technologies in both client and server side. In this paper, we describe several aspects that might be taken into account when designing Remote Laboratories, describing the XWL Architecture and comparing it with other existing architectures.