Loosely coupled web services in remote object federations

Abstract

Loosely coupled services are gaining importance in many business domains. However, compared to OO-RPC middleware approaches, emerging technologies proposed to implement loosely coupled services, such as Web services or P2P frameworks, still have some practical problems. These arise in many typical business domains, for instance, because of missing central control, high network traffics, scalability problems, performance overheads, or security issues. We propose to use ideas from these emerging technologies in a controlled environment, called a federation. Each remote object (a peer) is controlled in one or more federations, but within this environment peers can collaborate in a simple-to-use, loosely coupled, and ad hoc style of communication. Our design and implementation relies on popular remoting patterns. We present a generic framework architecture based on these patterns together with a prototype implementation.