Dmitri Tcherevik

Software platforms traditionally offered a publish/subscribe mechanism as one of the core platform services. With help from this mechanism, an application could raise events or express interest in events produced by other applications. The Internet and Web services are emerging as the next generation platform for distributed applications. While the new platform enables applications to communicate synchronously or asynchronously over standard Internet protocols, it is still lacking a service that would resemble a traditional publish/subscribe mechanism. In this article, I'll show how such a service can be developed by extending the functionality of an existing framework. Background There are many types of systems that could make use of a publish/subscribe service. Figure 1 presents one of them. This system consists of a number of agents and a few management applicat... (more)

Internet Operating Systems

It's banal but true. The network, or the Internet, has indeed become a computer. It's possible now to assemble an application from network-based components called Web services. The network serves as the platform, or "computer," for such an application. Granted, the new platform is not yet suitable for building robust business applications. Developing and maintaining such applications still requires significant effort. In addition, some of the required Web services are not yet fully defined. At the same time, it is clear now where the industry is going. We even have a new term de... (more)