| The constant driving factor behind the development of the Internet from its very beginning has been the combination of distributed data and software applications. The distribution of data has reached unforeseen dimensions with the development of the World Wide Web. On the basis of agreed standards, people are able to share and distribute information in a globally accessible, scalable fashion.
The distribution of applications however, has more complex needs. You need agreed protocols and interfaces between distributed software components and, last but not least the data exchanged by these components must be machine-readable and understandable.
To this end, service-oriented computing has become one of the predominant factors in current IT research and development efforts over the last few years. Standardization in this area has alreadymade its way out of the research labs into industrial strength technologies and tools. Again, Web technologies prove to be a good starting point: Web services seem to be the middleware solution of the future for enabling the development of highly interoperable, distributed software solutions: the new technologies subsumed under this common term promise easy application integration by means of languages such as XML, and a common communication platform by relying on widely used Web protocols. |